Ned Ludd's Latest Incarnations

This spring I bought an electric vehicle.  I bought it because I was tired of living in thrall of the terror of high and unpredictable gasoline prices, and because I was tired of financing (in my own small way) the geopolitical ambitions of thug nations with large oil reserves.  I bought it used from a rental agency instead of new because I am a cheapskate.  (And proud of it!)  I bought an EV that is not made by Tesla because I find Elon Musk to be emetic.  

My purchase of an EV was accompanied by a bit of research on the expansion of the EV market in the United States, as well as the progress of the rollout of clean energy both in the U.S. and worldwide.  In my research I discovered the unsurprising fact that many spokespersons from the white American evangelical/Protestant church are virulently opposed to the widespread adoption of both EV's and renewable energy.  I haven't looked too deeply at their reasons (some of which can be found here), although it wouldn't surprise me to hear that some pastors and other mouthpieces are probably claiming that EV's are yet another step to the emergence of a one-world government which will force us all to take the mark of ... the BEAST!  Pardon me while I roll my eyes at that one.  I do know that their chosen Presidential candidate is opposed to EV's.  But I'm not.  In fact, I like EV's.  I especially like mine, even though it's on the cheaper end of the spectrum.  

However, I have not yet paid for a home charging station.  This means that once every three or four weeks over the past five months I've been going to a local fast-charging station to top off my battery.  The charging station I've been using is part of a network of charging stations owned by an outfit called EVGo, a subsidiary of LS Power.  This past week I discovered that my favorite charging station was vandalized by people who cut the charging cords for all but one of the chargers.  On the same day I found out that the chargers had been vandalized, I discovered that this vandalism is part of a nationwide trend.  (See this and this for instance.)  Please note also that while much of the vandalism is motivated by a desire to make a quick buck off of stolen copper, the vandalism is also motivated in part by anger against the emergence of electric vehicle technology and the continued rollout of clean energy.  Evidently this has become a global phenomenon.  As a phenomenon it seems to me to share many characteristics of the anti-mask/anti-vax COVID denialism that was recently so prominent among the rank and file members of the Far Right in nations such as the United States.

It's telling that the police in my town have not been able to prevent the ongoing destruction or vandalizing of charging stations in my city.  Indeed it seems to me of late that the police are engaged in a passive-aggressive game in which they claim that because they can't so easily get away with committing unjust violence against those of us who do not have white skin, this of necessity means that they can't "do their jobs" in protecting our city from criminals who are caught red-handed or from motorists who drive like bats out of ...  I freely admit that maybe this last bit might just be my paranoid cynicism talking.  If you agree with my self-diagnosis, please "flap a napkin at me" as Barney Greenwald asked of his audience in the Caine Mutiny.  Or douse me with a bucket of cold water.  I promise I'll say "Thanks - I needed that!"  Meanwhile, I guess I'll be calling an electrician this week to get a home charging station installed.  Because, you see, I'm not going to give up my electric car.

Stopping To Smell the Roses (And Other Roadside Allergens)

It's been a bit since I wrote a new post for this blog.  Yet as I have discovered from recent comments to my blog, people are still visiting, reading, and making comments.  I want to take this opportunity to thank those who are still visiting this site and to explain my hiatus.

I remain deeply interested in the subject of economic precarity, not only in the United States, but throughout the developed world.   Therefore I'm still planning sooner or later to talk about those elements of precarity which I have not yet discussed, particularly regarding the coping mechanisms of the precariat.  However, it must be acknowledged that in order to say anything intelligent, I need time - time to think, time to do research, and time to synthesize my thoughts and research into a coherent post.  Writing some of the posts I want to write will be a rather heavy lift.  (I compare my attitude toward these posts to the attitude someone might have toward carting a huge pile of sand one wheelbarrow at a time after having worked at manual labor all day!  I know that sand needs to be moved, but please, not just yet...)

Another thing is that now seems to be a good time to take a bit of a mental health break.  The world at present is in a chaotic state due to the actions of rich and powerful people with narcissistic tendencies.  (I am thinking particularly of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.)  By their deeds they scream for attention, which seems to be a major motivation behind their choice to do such deeds.  Yet paying attention to these people and their deeds can be quite draining to the rest of us.  I am choosing right now to take a bit of a step back so that I can focus on the things in my life which are under my control and which I believe I have been called to do.  Focusing on that work helps me reclaim my agency.  Thus one of the things I have been doing is to read some big-picture books that provide the framework for identifying long-term social trends.  Also, I've started learning Mandarin Chinese.  I have my reasons, one of which is to gain the ability to understand China myself rather than hearing about China solely from increasingly right-wing American mass media.  Plus, it's just fun! - although I must go slowly.  (I've gotten to the point where I can tell you that 我有两只猫...)

I do remain interested in following the long-term outworking of certain social trends in both American and global society.  I am still very much convinced of the truth of such statements as, "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap."  I firmly believe this applies to those who violate the Biblical mandate for social justice.  Thus it is interesting to see how the white American evangelical/Protestant church has begun to reap some unexpectedly bitter consequences.

Take climate change, for instance.  The white American evangelical/Protestant church has for decades engaged in magical/wishful/denialist thinking in its refusal to acknowledge the reality that the Earth's climate is changing due to human economic activity.  So it's rather biting to see how the ongoing climate crisis has begun to affect conservative, patriotic, Rethuglican churches, both in the Bible Belt and elsewhere in the U.S.  This year at least one church was hit by a tornado while services were in progress, and an increasing number of conservative right-wing churches are finding that property insurers will no longer write policies for them.  Indeed, a large number of churches are finding that their existing property insurance policies are being canceled.  It's not that property insurers are asking these churches about their politics.  It's just that so many of these churches are in areas that have now become susceptible to catastrophic weather events and/or wildfires.  Thus they have become a bad insurance risk.  Then there's the effect of the massive evangelical abuse scandals on availability of liability insurance coverage for churches and their staff.  It's telling to think that churches must now think of such things.  Maybe God isn't really on their side after all.

Anyway, please stay tuned to this blog if you're a regular reader.  I should start posting again in late November or in December, unless something occurs to me that does not require much bandwidth in order to write about, in which case I'll post sooner.  Thanks, all!

The Billboard Blitz Continues

 

One of many evangelical billboards which have sprung

up lately in my city...

I have stated several times in this blog that I am a Bible-believing Christian who seeks to follow the New Testament.  However, that does not mean that I support everyone and everything that is called "Christian" nowadays in the United States.  One of the assertions which I have made in this blog over the last five or so years is that the sort of "Christianity" embodied in white American evangelicalism has nothing to do with doing to others what one would wish to be done to oneself, nor does it have anything to do with loving one's neighbor or providing material help to those who are in material need.  Rather, the words and deeds of white American evangelicalism show that these evangelicals have simply made themselves into a tool for amassing secular earthly economic, political, and cultural power.  White American evangelicalism has become an expression of national and ethnic narcissism, a mere civic religion designed to bolster the power of one particular tribe and to justify the bloody deeds which that tribe has done in its bid to Make Itself Great.  (Maybe it was never really anything more than that!)

One of the ways in which white American evangelicalism has made itself a political tool is by its evil marriage to the Republican Party and to those political parties to the right of the Republicans.  The white American evangelical/Protestant church has repeatedly asserted over the last several decades that the Republican Party is the party of "godliness" and that it is the duty of Christians to vote Republican, to salute the Flag, and to be rabid patriots.  Thus it has been interesting to see the appearance of billboards such as the one pictured at the side of one of the streets in my town - especially during this election season.  Like the spread of smallpox pustules, the growth of mold colonies, or the sprouting of mushrooms, these billboards have become ever more numerous during the year and a half from the time I first noticed their appearance until now.

Most of these billboards are at least as shrill as the one in the picture, although a few outdo even this.  I am thinking of one such billboard next to a freeway in my town, which reads something like "Where are you going? HEAVEN or HELL?"  I can agree in the abstract with some of the messages of these billboards.  For instance, I do believe that Jesus is alive and ascended to the right hand of God.  However, I cringe when I hear this statement shouted shrilly from a billboard.  To me, the greatest evidence of the risen Christ is that those who claim to be His followers are being transformed into decent people.  Being shouted at by a billboard is very much less than convincing - especially when so many of the shouters who pay for such billboards have been caught in all kinds of scandals and have backed all sorts of really creepy political candidates.

But shouting billboards do tell us one thing.  They tell us that the shouters likely have lots of money.  To shout from a billboard for one month costs around $1200 for a small billboard of the type typically seen next to a four-lane urban street.  If you want to keep shouting and you want to use the same billboard, monthly costs after the first month run around $1000.  That means that to blast a message from a billboard for an entire year costs over $12,000.  Multiply that by fifteen or twenty billboards and you can see that someone somewhere is paying serious folding money to do his shouting!  And the cost increases even more if the shouter uses large, multi-panel billboards for his shouting.  I don't have an exact figure for the number of billboards now being used for the religious billboard blitz in my town, but I can imagine that the cost for this year alone will run at least $500,000.  If the same sort of billboard blitz is taking place elsewhere in the U.S., that means that the backers of this campaign have deep pockets.  

Yet that money may largely be going to waste, as the burgeoning number of exvangelicals, "Nones" and churchless Christians in America indicates.  I for instance have not gone to church since March 2020.  It may be that American evangelical civic religion is turning into a broken weapon.

Voices In My Head...

As part of my efforts to satisfy my monthly craving for foreign (especially non-Western) fiction, I was scouring the Internet several weeks ago for audio recordings of classic Chinese fiction.  I find audio recordings to be really handy, since these days most of the time that I would spend in actually sitting down to read anything is taken up in reading technical literature for my business.  That is why although a few months ago I picked up a used copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I haven't yet read more than a few pages.  On the other hand, how different would things have been if I had been able to find an audio recording of the book narrated by a Latino voice actor! (And no, I will definitely not watch the Netflix version!  Many things that Netflix touches get turned into garbage.)

Anyway, back to classic Chinese fiction.  During my Internet searches, I found a website called the Chinese Lore Podcast produced by a man named John Zhu.  As he states on his website, his mission is to bring classic ancient Chinese literature to Western audiences who don't speak Chinese.  The classic works he covers are very long, so that re-telling the story contained in one book takes between three and four years' worth of episodes.  However, Mr. Zhu's re-telling is done with humor, fresh perspectives, and helpful insights into various historical aspects of Chinese culture.  I listened to his re-telling of the Water Margin (水滸傳), and am working my way through his re-telling of Investiture of the Gods (封神演義).  One characteristic of both stories is that each tells of an imperial center that is in decline due to internal corruption, and each shows the effect of that decline and corruption in the lives of the ordinary people of the land.  In the case of the heroes of Water Margin, the corruption and decline was partially and temporarily reversed, although some of the chief heroes were at the end cheated out of the enjoyment of that reversal.  I haven't yet finished Investiture of the Gods, yet I know from the historical events on which the story is based that in that story the decline could not be reversed, since the corrupting cause of that decline lay with the emperor himself.

Stories of imperial decline have held a growing fascination for me since the days of the corrupt U.S. presidency of Donald Trump from 2016 to 2020.  I fervently hope that we don't get another taste of Trump starting in 2025, yet the possibility of such an outcome has once again stimulated my interest in reading (or in my case, listening to) stories of corruption and the resulting societal decline resulting from that corruption.  Thus I have been listening with interest to Investiture of the Gods.  Note: in Investiture, Jiang Ziya is a cool character.  He's the brains behind the good guys... However, while Investiture does focus somewhat on the corruption and resulting decline at the center of the Shang dynasty during the reign of its final emperor, it also spends a lot of time in describing epic battles between massive armies who are sometimes helped and at other times hindered by the intervention of superhuman creatures with special powers.  If that sort of thing is your main interest and you've worn out all your Star Wars DVD's (for those who still own DVD's), then Investiture of the Gods should be right up your alley.  

Now I can enjoy a really good sword fight scene about as much as any other U.S. male, yet my interest in listening to Investiture lay more in tracing how the outworkings of corruption at the top of a society lead to the fracture of that society and the fracture of the power base on which the people at the top rely.  So I was motivated to search for nonfiction accounts of that sort of fracture.  And I chose to search particularly for examples of recent corporate decline and collapse.  This choice was partly motivated by my recent exposure to a book about the ethical failures at the Boeing Company which led to serious and sometimes fatal problems with the 737 MAX airplane.  As I previously mentioned on this blog, the problems within the Boeing Company are symptomatic of almost all of American late capitalism in the first half of the 21st century.  Thus it is fairly easy to find examples of once mighty and dominant U.S. corporations which have crashed and burned within the last twenty years.  

One such corporation is General Electric.  From my perusal of the book Obliquity by John Kay, as well as a brief examination of the history of GE, I had some idea of what to expect when examining GE. I knew I would find a company which started out by trying to make itself an industry leader in the manufacture of artifacts of beautifully good work that meets necessary needs, yet which lost its way once it made its primary goal the continuous growth of shareholder dividends and stock price.  According to many sources, this shift was most strongly exemplified in the reign of former GE CEO Jack Welch, who boasted 40 straight quarters (or ten years) of exceeding Wall Street projections of GE stock earnings growth.  Unfortunately, he did it by means of "creative earnings manipulation" according to a number of sources.  That manipulation included firing or laying off massive numbers of people in order to cut costs, as well as speculation in real estate and other debt markets through the subsidiary GE Capital.

I sought to learn more about the finer details of the decisions that derailed GE, so several days ago I bought an audiobook copy of Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon by William D. Cohan.  I was particularly hoping to learn the role of Jack Welch's leadership in the demise of GE.  As far as Cohan's book, I can only say that while there were good points, there were also bad (or weak) points.  The book's good points include a fairly accurate history of GE's early days.  For instance, Cohan rightly points out that GE was not actually founded by Thomas Edison, but was founded against Edison's wishes.  This is contrary to the mythology which has sprung up around GE.  However, Cohan fails to mention that neither Edison nor GE actually invented the world's first commercially available incandescent light bulbs.  (That honor actually goes to William E. Sawyer.)  Cohan also implies that GE was materially involved in the invention and development of the world's first turbojet engine.  That also is not true.  The first jet engine for aircraft was actually invented by a British air force officer and engineer named Frank Whittle.

The book's bad or weak points include the fact that Cohan glosses over the fact that Jack Welch's "rank and yank" system of firing those at the bottom ten percent of his staff in annual performance reviews actually created a toxic culture in which people strove to be in the mediocre middle because that was the safest place to be in the organizational culture.  Cohan also glosses over the impact of Welch's massive layoffs and other downsizing initiatives on both GE's products and on the workers who were let go.  And Cohan glosses over the impact of Welch's "creative earnings manipulation" on the future of GE - especially with regard to the reliance on the GE Capital subsidiary to make quarterly earnings targets.  The book goes on to lay the vast majority of the blame for the decline and fall of GE on Jeff Immelt, the CEO who succeeded Welch in 2001.  (While Immelt had some serious managerial weaknesses and GE under Immelt certainly made some serious errors (see this for instance), from other sources I get the impression that it was Jack who sailed the ship of GE into treacherous shoals.  Jeff was simply not equal to the task of getting GE away from the rocks.) Meanwhile, Jack Welch is portrayed as a Really Swell Guy overall.  Indeed, at times the book reads like a secular hagiography of Jack Welch and of GE.  Cohan's book in some ways reminds me of another book I listened to last winter: Family Reins: The Extraordinary Rise and Epic Fall of an American Dynasty by Billy Busch.  The publisher's blurb for this book touts it as an expose of the factors which led the Busch family to lose the Anheuser-Busch beer company to a foreign conglomerate.  Yet it actually reads as a self-indulgent portrait of the Busch family - almost an auto-hagiography of Billy Busch himself.  

Books like these make me wonder not only about the future of capitalism in the United States, but also about the future of serious scholarly study of the failures of American capitalism.  There is a crying need for such serious, rigorous, objective, well-informed study - especially in light of the number of formerly large American companies which have either been bought up by foreign investors in the 21st century or which have gone bankrupt and disappeared.  Otherwise people of the future may well be forced to look with perplexity at the monumental wreckage left behind by such companies, unable to discern the clues to their crashing end except that they were run by Really Swell Guys who somehow bear no culpability for the mess that has been left behind.  Meanwhile I am left wondering a few things myself, namely, whether the unrealistically optimistic group expectations fostered by a steady run of unrealistically good news actually doom organizations when those organizations are suddenly forced to face really bad news.  Also, how completely do the characteristics of corporate decline match the characteristics of imperial or societal decline?  Good questions, no?

And now back to the next epic battles of Investiture of the Gods!

The Coping Mechanisms of the Precariat: Prelude To The Great Resignation

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity and the precariat.  In the last post in this series, I introduced the concept of a social nonmovement.  To quickly review, a social nonmovement is the spontaneous, unplanned emergence of a set of social practices among a large number of people, among whom these practices begin to encroach upon and ultimately disrupt an existing status quo.  The concept of the social nonmovement is introduced and explored in Asef Bayat's book Life As Politics.  What is especially relevant to the precariat is the emergence of social nonmovements among the poor and powerless in response to the pressure inflicted on these people by the rich and powerful masters of an existing status quo.  These social nonmovements encroach upon and weaken the power of the masters of the existing status quo, yet they frequently operate outside the notice of these masters even as they weaken the power of these masters.  However, sometimes a social nonmovement catches the eye of a large number of the privileged members of a society - especially when the social nonmovement appears suddenly, spreads quickly, and achieves a massive amount of disruption in a short amount of time.

Such a social nonmovement is the Great Resignation - a time in which massive numbers of people decided that their jobs were such a royal pain that they refused to take anymore, and quit.  Most scholars and journalists consider the Great Resignation to be one of the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic which shut down much of the American economy in 2020 due to the failure of then-President Donald Trump and his Republican Party to effectively prepare for the pandemic.  These scholars and journalists consider 2021 and 2022 to be the peak years of the Great Resignation, and some of these even say that the Great Resignation is now largely over.  However, there are minority voices such as journalists at the Harvard Business Review who say that the Great Resignation is actually a long-term trend which began at the beginning of the last decade and is still continuing.

Most people who have been alive for any length of time realize that throughout history, worker attitudes have fluctuated between job satisfaction or dissatisfaction in cycles that are reminiscent of the alternation of yin and yang in ancient Chinese philosophy.  In today's post I hypothesize that the 1960's in the United States were a time of increasing job satisfaction for an expanding number of people.  However, in making such a hypothesis, I am confronted by the difficulties which social scientists have had in defining what exactly is job satisfaction, let alone in figuring out how to measure it.  (See, for instance, "What is Job Satisfaction?", Edwin A. Locke, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1969.)  Nevertheless, a 1982 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics supports my hypothesis, noting that in 1973, 87 percent of workers were either very satisfied or moderately satisfied with their jobs.

Yet that picture has obviously changed over the years.  In 2017, an organization called the Conference Board provided a chart outlining the historical measurement of U.S. worker job satisfaction from 1987 to 2016.  According to that chart, worker satisfaction was at or below 50 percent during five of the eight years of the presidency of Republican George W. Bush.  According to the 2022 "Job Satisfaction Chartbook" from the same source, job satisfaction "is the highest it has been in a decade" at 60 percent.  Yet according to the Achievers Workforce Institute, two-thirds of employees are thinking about leaving their jobs in 2024.  This was also true in 2022, according to the Institute. This is yet more evidence that the Great Resignation is an ongoing trend.  (Maybe the people who answered the Conference Board surveys in 2022 weren't fully sharing their feelings...)

Now declining job satisfaction can be tolerated by workers for a time, yet as it intensifies, it leads to a point in which people decide that the pain of staying in an existing intolerable situation exceeds any potential suffering involved in making a change to that situation.  And workers have from time to time reacted explosively to their workplaces as illustrated by songs like "Oney" (written by Gary Chesnut and sung by Johnny Cash) and "Take This Job And..." (written by David Allan Coe and sung by Johnny Paycheck), as well as idioms such as "going postal."  (By the way, I do not condone or encourage workplace violence!)  But stories about successful quitting have been made to seem like the sort of rare events that are beyond the reach of most working stiffs.  Yet the undeniable fact is that during the last years of the last decade and the first years of this decade, a huge number of people found themselves pushed into quitting.  It is natural to ask what factors pushed so many into quitting at around the same time.

I will not definitively answer that question today.  However, I will suggest what I consider to be the likely factors.  Treat my suggestions as hypotheses, if you will.

• First, there is the erosion of the power of organized labor, an erosion which actually began with Republican President Richard Nixon's wage and price controls in the early 1970's.  This erosion kicked into high gear under the Republican presidency of Ronald Reagan and has not slowed down since.  The power of unions to protect their workers from low wages and excessive work demands was thus eroded.
• There is also the removal of the guarantee of lifetime employment for good and loyal employees of large corporations.  This was pioneered by such CEO's as Jack Welch of General Electric and was a direct contributor to the economic precarity suffered by a majority of working Americans today.
• There were the stresses imposed by globalism as wage and labor arbitrage.  This globalism was championed by right-wing, conservative executives of major corporations - the same sort of executives who are in many cases supporting the MAGA hostility to open borders championed by Donald Trump, as they see that sometimes smart people from poor countries can turn the tables on economic systems that are rigged against them.
• Consider also the removal or weakening of workplace protections against employer abuse.  Many employers (as well as business customers), thus unhindered from having to be humane toward their employees, turned some of those employees into metaphorical toilet paper, doormats, and punching bags onto whom these bosses could project their unresolved and unjustified hostility.
• Lastly (at least for today's post), there is the rise of the toxic workplace - a workplace in which bosses either perpetrate or enable bullying and mobbing behavior by popular workplace staff against those who are deemed to be scapegoats.  

Note that the last two factors are the direct result of the creation of a massive power imbalance between employers and employees over the last four decades.  The employees, reduced to a state of naked dependency on capricious bosses and a capricious labor market, were thus exposed to the prospect of either starving or having to meet unreasonable and destructive demands from these employers.  This made the management ladder a very attractive place for abusive, psychopathic, sociopathic, and otherwise personality-disordered people to take root.  Now here's an interesting perspective on the reason why leaders and managers allow abusive workplaces to continue: their continuance satisfies the ongoing psychological cravings of such managers.  A parallel to the abusive workplace is the abusive church.  As "Captain Cassidy" pointed out in a recent post on her blog Roll to Disbelieve, the whole point of creating an abusive power structure is so that the masters of such a structure (and those who are their special pets) can enjoy the psychological thrill of owning such a power structure.  And what is the best way to experience that thrill?  Why, to abuse the people at the bottom levels of such a structure, of course!  Consider Captain Cassidy's third and fourth points from the post I have cited:

• "Nothing is ever off-limits for those who hold power. More to the point, following the group’s rules is for the powerless. The powerful not only do not follow those rules, they flaunt their disobedience."

• "The powerful delight in the most potent expressions of power: forcing people to do things they don’t want to do; rubbing their own disobedience in the noses of the powerless. If power is not flexed, the powerful might as well not have it at all."

Captain Cassidy's perspective echoes what Chauncey Hare and Judith Wyatt wrote in Chapter 4 of their 1997 book Work Abuse: How To Recognize and Survive It.  But just as abusive churches (and abusive white American evangelicalism) have begun to suffer a loss of social power as their abuse has been exposed, abusive workplaces throughout the English-speaking world have begun to suffer an erosion of economic power.  Consider that workplace mistreatment cost U.S businesses between $691.7 billion and $1.7 trillion in 2021, according to a 2021 article in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.  A 2023 Forbes article puts the cost of toxic workplaces to U.S. businesses at $1.8 trillion annually.  According to a 2019 SHRM report, the cost of employee turnover in 2019 due to job dissatisfaction alone was $223 billion.  No matter what number is used, we're not talking chump change here.  What's more, toxic workplace culture has been a key characteristic of companies that either recently underwent scandals or were driven out of business, companies such as Volkswagen, Theranos (and its jailbird ex-CEO), and WeWork, to name a few.

The pinnacle of ecstasy for abusive employers seemed to come in the early months of 2020, in which powerful employers were able to bully their staff (many of whom were stuck in low-wage "service" jobs) to show up for work during the COVID-19 pandemic.  It was that pressure and the resulting threat of actual physical death which proved to be the final straw for many people who had hitherto surrendered themselves to enduring toxic workplaces.  This is also what pushed the upward trend of the Great Resignation into something of a landslide-in-reverse and which catapulted the Great Resignation into the forefront of the American public consciousness.  The next post in this series will examine the paths taken by workers from various sectors of the American economy after they quit their jobs from 2020 onward.

P.S. While I have enjoyed many of the posts on Captain Cassidy's blog Roll to Disbelieve, I can't say that I agree with everything she has written.  For instance, I am still a Christian, whereas she has deconstructed to such an extent that she has rejected Christianity altogether.  However, I can't say that I blame her as I look at the sorry legacy of white American evangelicalism and its marriage to secular earthly economic and political power.

P.P.S. I have mentioned Donald Trump a few times in today's post.  Some from the Right may assert that I should not speak critically of him since he supposedly recently survived an "assassination attempt."  And I must say that while I despise Donald Trump, I do not condone any attempt to assassinate him.  However, when I read that his injuries were not life-threatening (in fact, some reports state that he was not actually hit by a bullet at all), I have to wonder if the whole "assassination attempt" wasn't some kind of publicity stunt or false-flag operation designed to boost his media profile and polling numbers.  I don't have much sympathy...

Book Recommendation - Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing

I recently bought an audiobook copy of Peter Robison's book Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing.  It's been a fascinating listen so far.  For those unfamiliar with the story, the 737 MAX is the most recent version of the Boeing 737 aircraft.  It was hastily (and some would say haphazardly) developed by the Boeing Company as a competitive response to the introduction of the Airbus A320neo family of commercial passenger aircraft by European aircraft manufacturer Airbus SE.  Airbus is now larger than Boeing and earns more revenue than Boeing, even though Airbus was founded decades after the founding of the Boeing Company.

One of the reasons why Airbus is now bigger and more influential than Boeing is the Boeing 737 MAX.  The various versions of the 737 have all arisen from an initial design that is nearly 60 years old, and which has been stretched and tweaked in order to compete and remain relevant in comparison to Airbus offerings.  In the case of the MAX, one of the modifications involved increasing the size of the engines and placing them far forward on the wings so that the center of gravity of the airplane was shifted relative to earlier versions of the 737.  This led to a natural aerodynamic tendency of the nose of the MAX to pitch upward at unwanted times during certain maneuvers.  Boeing could have responded to this problem by redesigning the aircraft's control surfaces, but Boeing upper management pushed hard to avoid any modifications that might cost money and slow deliveries of the airplane.  So they resorted to a software "fix" in the aircraft flight control computers that would force the nose of the aircraft down in the event that the computer and its sensors determined that the aircraft was about to enter a stall condition.  There were only a few problems with this solution...  One of these problems was that in budget versions of the aircraft, the computer depended on inputs from only one sensor, and if that sensor malfunctioned, the computer could crash the airplane.  Another problem was that when Boeing sold budget versions of the MAX to airlines (especially overseas airlines operating in the developing world), it did not tell pilots or aircraft owners about this software system.  As a result, there were two crashes of the 737 MAX in 2018 and 2019.  All crew and passengers were killed.  (One other thing to note: this year, in 2024, an emergency exit plug blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX in flight, resulting in an explosive decompression and an emergency landing at Portland International Airport.)

One might ask how such a state of affairs was allowed to develop in an American company that used to be the epitome of American innovation and technological advancement.  Peter Robison's book describes how at the beginning of the jet age, Boeing became focused on being the best, most technically advanced aircraft manufacturer in the world, obsessed with pushing the envelope of aircraft design to produce the world's most advanced and capable passenger aircraft.  For instance, the Boeing 747 was the company's proudest achievement of the 20th century.  But all that changed when Boeing merged with McDonnell-Douglas in 1997, with the result that the focus of the Boeing company became maximizing shareholder value, revenue, and stock price while minimizing costs.  Thus over the next three decades the Boeing Company began to resemble a once proud, strong ox or bull being eaten from the inside by tapeworms.

Robison's Flying Blind is a gripping, exciting, emotive expansion and elaboration of a theme which was touched on briefly in the third chapter of a much drier and more stuffy academic book which I listened to back in 2022, namely, Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly, by John Kay.  In that third chapter, titled "The Profit-Seeking Paradox: How The Most Profitable Companies Are Not The Most Profit-Oriented," Kay tells the story of a few well-known, formerly powerful companies which, to use my own words, began with the main goal to "do beautifully good work in order to meet necessary needs".  As they got really, really good at doing that kind of work, they naturally began to earn lots of money.  But as soon as they shifted their focus from being primarily about doing beautifully good work to making lots of money, they began to destroy themselves.  If you decide to read the book, note that Kay specifically mentions Boeing in this chapter.

Yet this is the character of almost all of American late capitalism in 2024.  This is also the economic philosophy pushed by all of the media outlets of the American Right.  This is not only leading to the hollowing-out of once-iconic American businesses by rich parasites, but is also contributing to the precarity and inequality that define American society at this time.  I can't help but think that this is going to end badly for the parasites at the top.  

The Coping Mechanisms of the Precariat, And Their Effects - Introduction

This series of posts on precarity has nearly finished sketching the outlines of the origins and spread of the precariat, as well as the global composition and local expressions of the precariat.  However, I must admit that one thing these posts have not dealt with in detail is the deliberate, willful attempt by a malignant privileged group in a society to force members of non-privileged groups into menial or precarious employment.  In other words, we have not dealt with the effects of racism and discrimination on precarity.  

There are a couple of reasons why I haven't dealt with this aspect of precarity in detail in this series of posts.  First, I have to confess that dealing with this subject is a real drag.  Let me just say it plainly.  As a Black American, I find it extremely distasteful to have to consider the revival of garbage that I thought had been over and done with by the time I got out of high school.  I find it incredible that so many white supremacist types would cling to their stupid notions of supremacy for decades, and that this desperate narcissism would find expression in political eruptions such as the candidacy of Sarah Palin in 2008, the candidacy of Donald Trump in 2016 and (Dear God, can it really be?!) in 2024, the continued existence of the media empires of Rupert Murdoch and people like him, and the continued efforts of one "special" group of people to Make Themselves Great by ruining everyone else.  Fortunately, the rest of the world seems to be escaping from the thrall of white American supremacists, and the United States is no longer the frontrunner in global peer-polity competition.

One other thing about dealing with this subject is the effects produced by the knowledge of the ways in which the predations of the privileged hurt the members of marginalized groups.  For the malignant narcissists among the privileged, such information serves as a source of narcissistic supply, because these people can point to the damage they do to others and tell themselves that this proves that they themselves are indeed powerful.  For the members of the marginalized, such information can tend to convince them that they have no agency, no ability to change their situation.  Such a notion is false.  To quote from an earlier post in this series, 

The inescapable reality is that the only thing that will reliably alter our situation is our choice to begin to organize ourselves for collective action.  As Maciej Bartkowski said in his book Recovering Nonviolent History, 

"The guilt of falling into . . . predatory hands . . . [lies] in the oppressed society and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility.  Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."

Or, to quote from Alex Soojung Kim-Pang,

"Collective action is the most powerful form of self-care."  (Emphasis added.) 

This collective action is wonderful when it succeeds.  It is rather depressing when such action is sabotaged or undermined or co-opted by Uncle Toms and Aunt Tammys, or when an oppressed people refuses to do the hard work of building collective self-reliance. 

Yet self-conscious, centrally planned collective action is not the only kind of collective action that exists.  Consider the "social nonmovements" described by Asef Bayat in his book Life as Politics.  Such "social nonmovements" can be described as

"the collective actions of noncollective actors; they embody shared practices of large numbers of ordinary people whose fragmented but similar activities trigger much social change, even though these practices are rarely guided by an ideology or recognizable leaderships and organizations." - Life as Politics, p. 14.

 In other words, social nonmovements consist of masses of people who don't necessarily deliberately associate with each other, yet who find themselves making similar responses to emergent social pressures and threats.  A social nonmovement is like a naturally formed (not manmade) cosmic laser or maser consisting of atoms or molecules which come together under natural forces to produce coherent light.  In the same way, social nonmovements can have disruptive effects on a social status quo.

In the next few posts in this series, we will begin to explore such a social nonmovement.  The forces which produced this nonmovement are the rise of toxic workplaces throughout the industrialized world, but especially in the United States, Britain and Australia.  The social nonmovement we will study is the Great Resignation, and the responses and life adjustments made by those who quit their jobs during the Great Resignation.  We will also examine the effects of the Great Resignation on established businesses.  (Hint: tolerating or deliberately creating a toxic workplace is an excellent way for a business owner to be forced out of business!)  Thus we are about to embark on the next stage in this series, namely, the coping mechanisms of the precariat.  Stay tuned...