The Sickness

The SICKNESS is an examination of American society, exposing the symptoms of our debilitating adherence to market capitalism.

[truthsick]

What Is Just

Ken Langone is an American capitalist, and now memoirist.

Ken Langone fancies himself a good guy. In fact, everyone fancies him a good guy, if his memoir, “I Love Capitalism! An American Story” is to be believed. Every interaction has the other person singing his praises, which must be an odd way to go through life, with every conversation consisting of compliments in one direction. From the college professor who saw through his horrible grasp of language into his prodigious understanding of capitalism, to Bernie Madoff attempting a grift, Langone is consistently praised by others. Perhaps this is why he thinks so highly of himself, but I’m sure a little of it is on his own ego.

My problem with Langone isn’t just that he comes off horribly in his own memoir, it’s that he claims Catholicism in his rise to the top of the richest people on earth.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t want to read this book. My grandmother got it for me for my birthday, and sent it to me in the mail with a note that said,

    “When I saw this book advertised I thought of you - I think I got Capitalism and Socialism mixed up! However - it is always a good idea to know more. Let me know what you think of Langone. As a man - as a Catholic, I like what Cardinal Dolan has to say on the back cover. Maybe you could do a review…”

Grandma was definitely right - it is a good idea to know more, and I learned more than I ever thought I could from this guy.

And I learned that Cardinal Dolan should beg the publisher to remove his name from the book.

On full display here is the egotism that fuels the top “earners’” accumulation of wealth. But also on full display is the cognitive dissonance that any self-professed religious man has to have in order to live like Langone does.

It’s strange that Langone doesn’t try to mask his love of money. He admits that he just loves making it. It doesn’t matter what he’s doing, he just loves the money. As a kid, “As long as I had that money in my pocket I was okay.” “I knew damn well I didn’t want to be poor, I wanted to be rich.” He doesn’t say things about liking the things money can buy him, or the security he felt with having a lot of it, just that he loves money, it was that simple.

To that end his first grift was selling wreaths door to door at a profit, while paying his employees (other 11 year olds) a tuppence. Then in college he sold neckties and stationary to freshman even knowing they would never use the paper. Then he became the campus rep for Winston cigarettes, which along with a monthly salary, came free cigarettes that he sold instead of giving away. He didn’t care about the ethics of his actions. He was taking advantage of these guys, and offers the meager statement, “I guess you might say I was being exploitative.” Note that this is not him admitting to exploitation, just getting ahead of the accusations by saying you might think that. He never would.

Langone consistently tries to shield himself from such accusations. Once he’s making huge deals on stock he says that he lets his clients choose his commission rate, so he doesn’t have to appear greedy by demanding a huge sum. But of course he gets huge sums, because he was dealing in a greedy, excessive industry; he tries to treat the money as incidental, just something that comes with the territory. This is at odds to his grandstanding about buying a jet, and moving to the nice neighborhood, and buying more houses, and traveling to Europe whenever he wants, and having a driver, and never worrying about how much he spends on everything. And he might not worry about how much he spends, but he sure remembers and mentions how much everything he bought cost. And he finds ways to shoehorn in just how much he’s donated to various causes. And while charity is great, let’s marvel at this quote: “It was then and there that I decided to give $100 million, anonymously, to NYU Medical Center.” He should try harder to be anonymous.

I don’t know where else to put this, and I know that Langone is from another era, but he feels the need to point out whenever someone in the book is black (and they are almost never black) or Jewish, and often makes crude racial statements, especially about Jews.

I’m also not going to touch his thoughts on socialism or economic progress because it is clear he doesn’t understand these topics well at all. He says that “I do know that nobody can live on $20,000 a year,” but then opposes a raise of the minimum wage, so there’s nothing really to be said here other than he doesn’t actually care about poor people. His whole schtick is that since capitalism worked for him it can work for anybody, even though all the things he says oppose this idea.

Let’s move to the Catholic bit.

Langone retells the parable of the workers in the vineyard, where the laborer hired in the morning, and the laborer hired in the afternoon receive the same wage. When the landowner explains himself (Langone calls him the “farmer”, a subconscious attempt to connect a landlord to the idyllic American ideal of a farmer? A common person?), Langone hears, “am I not free to do as I wish with my own money? Are you envious because I am generous?” But fails to read the very next line: “Thus, the last will be first, and the first will be last.” Here is Langone’s analysis:

    “The first guy bitches. The farmer says, “Hey I didn’t take anything away from you. It’s my money.” That’s the essence of capitalism. It’s investing, and people are always your best investment.”

This is such a self serving, selective reading, and it seems to be emblematic of his relationship with religion. What he looks for in religion is the same thing he looks for in other people: confirmation that he is doing the right thing. That him chasing money is a good and worthwhile thing to do. He even brings up the camel passing through the eye of the needle, but uses his charitable giving as a way to dodge the ramifications. Rather than follow the biblical gospel he chooses the gospel according to Warren Buffett, and mentions how he’s given away more than half of his net worth already, but, “as much as we give, it keeps coming back: we’ve made back all the money we’ve given away, and more.”

And yet, he claims that he has sacrificed to donate his money. “My firm belief about donating money is that if you’re not sacrificing something, you’re not being truly philanthropic. Add up everything I own - the plane, the houses, the cars - and even all the yearly maintenance, the sum comes to about one-third of the total amount of money that we’ve given away.” In Ken Langone’s mind, he is sacrificing by only having one jet instead of three, four houses instead of twelve. This is the logic of a lunatic. This is the logic of someone so perverted by money, so disconnected to the reality of 99% of the world, that he sees only having one personal jet as a sacrifice. All it took to corrupt him was the whole world.

Another passage:

    “Should I follow the bible? I’ll be honest: I’m not giving everything away. Why? Because I love this life! I love having nice houses and good people to help me. I love getting on my airplane instead of having to take my shoes off and wait in line to take a commercial flight. You want to accuse me of living well? I plead guilty. I envy people who aren’t as motivated by material things as I am. … If that’s greed, let the chips fall where they may. As I said, I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is better."

After reading this book it is obvious that Langone was never actually poor, and that he can only think he was poor because now he has $3.4 billion so his views are distorted. And passages like this show that he truly does not empathize with actual poor people, or maybe he would be willing to give up his luxuries. It’s clear that he knows he is greedy, but is proud of this greed, because in his mind anyone would choose his life, so he is justified in choosing it also.

In one passage meant to make him seem magnanimous, Langone recounts how he found out South American textile workers for one of his corporations were only making the equivalent of $4,000 per year, and on the spot he gave them all a raise to $5,200. This is the tragic comic of a man not only missing the forest for the trees, but only seeing the tree when he walked straight into it. This anecdote shows how Langone, by doing nothing of real substance other than taking a tiny, tiny part of his profit and returning it to the workers, feels like a world class guy. With one stroke of his pen he changed the lives of 180 people. Rather than seeing him as a benevolent boss, though, we should see him as a ruthless oppressor. Who gave these people such poor wages in the first place? Maybe not Langone, but someone just like him. And Langone has the power to make systemic changes, but does not, because that would eat too far into his profits. He’s okay with $8 million instead of 9, but he would not be happy with the workers getting their fair share, which is to say all of it.

My grandmother was right, I did learn a lot from reading this book. Perhaps the best part of me reading this book is that I get to recommend that no one else ever does. This is a vanity project. This is Langone navel gazing and loving what he sees. Unknowingly, this is him showing how the rich and powerful think, the inner workings of the psychotic mind that acts only for profit, without care to where it comes from.

You might think I’m being unfair, and that Langone deserves to enjoy himself, that he worked hard for his money. I just don’t think that’s the case. Langone made his money by aiding private companies with their IPOs. While doing this he consistently pushed the founders of companies out of their own businesses to put leadership in place that would serve the shareholders, leaders who would put stock price ahead of the businesses’ products and services. He even did this with the business he helped “co-found”, Home Depot. He forced the founding CEO out in favor of someone he liked better. He fostered a business community that was bad for consumers and workers. And he did it all so he and his friends could make money. Ken Langone is a disgusting portrait of the excesses of the American financial world.

Langone, not just as a rich and powerful man, but as a plain human, needs to be held to a higher standard, the same standard as the rest of us. All of the opportunities that Langone had to be a force for good that were lost because he only thought of himself should be his greatest regrets. But he appears to have none. This matters because the highest standard of all is waiting in the afterlife, and Langone seems to be heading toward utter failure for the first time.

This is a depressing review, because the subject truly is depressing.

Maybe to end this I should say something nice about him. To his credit, Langone does give a lot of money away. But after reading this book, perhaps he should take another shot at being an anonymous donor.

[truthsick]

Free to Slave

What’s this obsession with personal freedoms that I keep hearing about?

One of them is freedom of the kind of work we want to do, which I understand that people think this is freedom because the government doesn’t assign you a job at birth, but that’s a pretty low bar for freedom. It seems that people choose to work because the alternative is starvation. We’d make that decision every time. But do we really have freedom of employment?

Is it really freedom when you need 3 years of experience to get an entry level job?

There are less good jobs than there are good applicants, which is why starting salaries are so low, requirements are so high, and duties are so extreme. The only reason an employer can require 3 years experience for an entry level job is that there is a reserve labor force eager to work in their field, and once that person is disillusioned, they’re spun out and another young person takes their place. Or the employer just gets an H1-B worker who they can pay even less. I’ve heard the argument that the experience required can be internships, but since many internships are unpaid, poor students cannot afford to take them. Not that summer jobs can put a dent into student loans, but many young people cannot afford to defer wages until graduation. So in effect, employers are closing their jobs to all but the wealthier applicants. Is this freedom?

In a field like nursing this reserve labor cycle is very obvious. Students incur massive debt to get their degree, and start working in a hospital or care facility upon graduation. They are overworked and underpaid and feel constrained by the long hours and inconsistent shift times. To regain some freedom after a few years of work they move to a different sector, perhaps in home aid, or a smaller facility. But these jobs don’t pay as well, or have worse or no benefits, or actually make them feel even more constrained, maybe they just made a mistake in changing jobs. Maybe they want to go back to their old job, but guess what, they have to start back at the starting salary, which by now might be even lower than when they graduated. Repeat ad nauseum. Is this freedom?

Or say you live in one of the 28 right to work states and you want your job to be a little better, so you talk to your coworkers about bringing concerns to management together. And you are fired with no notice, and given no reason. Is this freedom?

So what should work be?

It should first be remunerative. We need to be paid for our work, and we need to be paid fairly. There should be a minimum wage that allows a person to live. There are lots of issues with everything being too expensive (housing, healthcare and insurance, education, transportation), but until those problems are solved employers need to compensate their workers justly. This means a pay raise for most people and a pay cut for executives who actually do less valuable work than the “rank-and-file”.

It should be fulfilling. We need work that is meaningful, which usually means productive. It’s good to be able to see the fruits of your labor. Many industries are actually destructive, like finance and many types of technology and engineering. If your job is one where you can help another person, or produce an item, or help provide a useful service, you can feel good about your work at the end of the day.

I think being paid and being meaningful are inseparable as the most important parts of work. Lots of people do bad jobs for good pay, or good jobs for bad pay, and it’s considered a dream to get the good pay good job. This should be the standard, and we all know it. Most bad jobs are because of the pay - think about it, if you were paid a living wage to work at a cash register, you would be much happier about performing that labor. Things would be much more pleasant for everyone, all the time. On the other hand, you have jobs for corporations that create the instruments of war. It shouldn’t be fulfilling to design or manufacture weapons, like say Raytheon does. I’m sure there are many people who work at Raytheon who wish they weren’t part of the supply chain that kills people, but hey, it’s a job and it pays. I understand why people work in those places, and why they wish they could have better duties for the same pay.

The biggest problem with employment is that corporations see their responsibility as being to the shareholders, not the employees or consumers. So they charge the consumer as much as possible for whatever service or product it is, and pay their employees as little as they can.

Unionization is definitely the answer. Co-operatives are definitely the answer. Nationalizing certain industries is definitely the answer.

There are a lot of moving parts in life and all the problems are targeting the poor. We need a fundamental overhaul of our governmental processes. Our “representatives” have no idea what it is like to labor in the real world. They are almost uniformly wealthy, come from wealthy families, and don’t have a way to connect with us on these issues. So voting out incumbents is definitely the answer.

It seems insane to me that America is all for spreading democracy through war, but won’t allow democracy into our offices, factories, schools, hospitals, fields, and so on. The anti-union sentiment we have is against our best interests.

Just start talking about it. The more workers agitate for better wages and benefits and working conditions, the more we move toward workplace democracy as individuals, the better suited we will be to make systemic changes. Essentially: be the change you wish to see in the world, but don’t stop there.

[truthsick]

Hard Questions

I want to ask a lot of questions, because I’ve been wondering a lot. Everything is geared toward the interests of the ruling class, of course, but I’m told that a lot of these injustices are “good business” or “part of the system” or, most obtusely, “natural”. Lots of things make sense under capitalism, but this doesn’t make them right in the grand, correct sense.

So, is it right?

That 1% own 40% of wealth?

That 10% of households own 84% of stocks, but economists and the media use the stock market as the marker for the country's success?

That the median congressman has a household net worth of over $1 million, while the average citizen’s household net worth is $56k?

That the minimum wage $7.25 at full time hours comes out to $15,080/year before taxes, health insurance etc. $15/hr is only $31,200?

That CEOs make on average 339 times more than the average worker?

That universal healthcare would cost less than our privatized system while expanding coverage, and a majority of Americans support it, but we still don’t have it?

That America has been at war for 89 of the last 100 years?

That corporations that lobby for war profit off war?

That corporations and wealthy individuals spend millions of dollars on campaign donations and lobbying for their own interests?

That corporations and wealthy individuals work very hard to find loopholes to avoid paying taxes?

That voting districts are gerrymandered?

That the cost of college tuition has outpaced inflation by 400%?

That student loan debt is currently nearly 10% of the GDP?

That “right to work” laws give employers power to fire with no notice for no reason?

That unions are undermined by big businesses to avoid giving their workers fair wages and benefits?

That businesses can pay their employees so little that they tell them to apply for welfare when they start work?

That insurance companies can make more money from certain people dying so they let those people die?

That prisoners are paid less than $1/hour to do manual labor producing goods that are then labeled 'made in America'?

That cops can take cash from innocent people under civil forfeiture laws?

That people can be murdered by cops at traffic stops?

That there are 31 senators who have been in office for over twelve years?

That both political parties are in the pockets of their donors, especially the banks?

That the cost of housing has risen above pre 2008 levels with no signs of stopping?

That during the next crash the wealthy will take advantage of the poor by buying their property?

That empathy is replaced by a rabid belief in “personal freedom”?

I think that if you look at these questions through a lens of genuine care, and sympathy for others, you will find that the systems controlling our country, which ultimately control our daily lives, have been corrupted by the rich. Think about it.