We’ve been spending some time curled up by the fire (there is no fire) with a copy of Jacobin Magazine’s Inflation edition, the better to hone our socialist uprising skills. In a story about the social setting of Kenny Gamble’s and Leon Huff’s hit-making songwriting enterprise in 1970s Philadelphia, we learned about a singer, Janet Greene, who was recruited by an anti-communist organization to become what writer Fergal Kinney describes as the anti-Joan Baez.
That’s a real album cover and those are real song titles. One can imagine all the anti-communist cool kids sitting around a driftwood bonfire at the beach singing “Termites” or “Commie Lies” while couples retreat hand-in-hand to the flickering shadows for a little anti-commie canoodling.
Damn. That was vivid.
One of the points made repeatedly throughout the issue is that when national political leaders call for popular solidarity — one example cited is Gerald Ford’s WIN (Whip Inflation Now) campaign, in which we were all supposed to clip coupons for the economy — it’s not you they’re worried about, and it’s not you who will benefit. This was and remains particularly true of Black people and low-income workers of all stripes, and Kinney says that Gamble and Huff were keenly aware of this.
If their first hit — the O’Jays’ tetchy, paranoid 1972 single “Back Stabbers” — hinted at more adult themes than their Motown contemporaries, then the following year’s smash “Year of Decision” by the Three Degrees proved that something remarkable was going on over in the City of Brotherly Love. Taking advantage of developments in FM radio quality, this was a black creativity broad enough to encompass both disco and Rachmaninov. Get past the orgasmic strings, though, and you’ll hear a plea for togetherness, coupled with sharp warnings about the alternative. “People have died to set you free,” cautions vocalist Fayette Pinkney. Whether by accident or by design — it’s unclear — the single shared a name with a Ronald Reagan speech cut into flexi disc and widely distributed on the campaign trail in California a few years prior.
These were years when John Lennon was boasting about writing radical music “with sugar on it for conservatives,” but it was Philly’s Gamble and Huff that were actually doing it. More was soaring than just Thom Bell’s string lines, though. The cost of living was escalating sharply for millions, hitting black America hardest.1
Kinney is obviously striking parallels with the current day. Unemployment and inflation in the 1970s hit monstrous levels, and worse ones as always for Black workers. Philadelphia was no exception.
Unemployment now is notionally2 much better than then, but inflation on necessities like food and fuel is higher than any gains in wages workers are seeing. People who depend on fossil fuels for heat in the winter will be hammered even more. And now, as then, the central bank is taking inflation control out of the worker’s hide. The headline unemployment rate will be rising, and people who are now on the cusp of getting by or not will be falling into “not.”
Prognostication, as we’ve said many times in order to keep ourselves from trying it again, is not our game. We’re bad at it. But here goes anyway.
We imagine most of our readers aren’t feeling the economic squeeze to the point of getting ground down, but you’ll be sensitive to it in other people. We’re more or less immune to the stresses ourselves, although gasoline is a bit of an issue.
We don’t see Democrats nationally expressing the same sensitivity. They’re still saying the economy is good, they’re not talking much about inflation or who is getting hardest hit by it, and the two big motivating issues they have, the overturning of Roe and the threat of right-wing authoritarianism, may not be enough to overcome the economic squeeze at present afflicting important voter blocs.
What we mean is that we think Democrats will get creamed in the midterms, current polling notwithstanding.
Jacobin has some individual but representative examples of people who have been scraping by and are drawing closer to not doing so.
Saperstein began working for his employer, Horizon House, while he was still in high school. After twenty-three years on the job, he earns $19 per hour maintaining a high-rise in Fort Lee. Saperstein told Jacobin that for him and Luz , a first-grade teacher, saving money is pretty much out of the question: “Now, with everything going up, I’m paying $35 extra a week in gas that I didn’t plan on.” By this spring, the couple was spending $175 weekly to fuel the two cars they lease so they can drive to work and take their four-year-old son, Ryan, to school.
When their building sells, Saperstein doesn’t know what they’ll do. They’ll likely end up crammed in accommodations with his father or mother-in-law, at least temporarily. He thinks the government should intervene to make affordable housing a possibility for families like his: “I mean, rent’s out of control. Rent’s just way too much.” And yet, “there’s no program, unless you’re really poor, to go into housing.” Saperstein says his family can afford to pay a rent; they just “can’t afford that high a rent. But there’s no program out there for that.”
New Jersey does have a rental assistance program, but the Sapersteins don’t qualify for it. Even if they did, the waitlist has been closed for months.3
And more. People in that sort of situation tend to stay home on voting day if they’re with the party in power, or to vote vengefully if they’re not. And that’s without necessarily realizing the extent to which workers are congenitally screwed.4
If you’re in the mood for a more in-depth, altitudinal look at inflation, Jacobin offers that as well, in economist Doug Henwood’s “Yes, You Should Worry About Inflation” in the same issue.5 The piece is long but informative and eminently readable even if you’re a perpetual economic novice like us.
You may recall our mention of a Financial Times story illustrating the pathetic state of workers and the poor — to whatever extent those don’t overlap — and how much better off those classes would be if the U.S. imitated more egalitarian countries, such as the (sort of) socialist hell that is Norway. The headline of that piece was “Britain and the US are poor societies with some very rich people.”6
The rich in the US are exceptionally rich — the top 10 per cent have the highest top-decile disposable incomes in the world, 50 per cent above their British counterparts. But the bottom decile struggle by with a standard of living that is worse than the poorest in 14 European countries including Slovenia.
To be clear, the US data show that both broad-based growth and the equal distribution of its proceeds matter for wellbeing. Five years of healthy pre-pandemic growth in US living standards across the distribution lifted all boats, a trend that was conspicuously absent in the UK.
But redistributing the gains more evenly would have a far more transformative impact on quality of life for millions. The growth spurt boosted incomes of the bottom decile of US households by roughly an extra 10 per cent. But transpose Norway’s inequality gradient on to the US, and the poorest decile of Americans would be a further 40 per cent better off while the top decile would remain richer than the top of almost every other country on the planet.
That sounds good, that Norway thing! We’re about in the middle of that bottom 10%, and wouldn’t it be lovely to live with a Norway distribution on our little tropical isle.
Where would you rather live? A society where the rich are extraordinarily rich and the poor are very poor, or one where the rich are merely very well off but even those on the lowest incomes also enjoy a decent standard of living?
For all but the most ardent free-market libertarians, the answer would be the latter. Research has consistently shown that while most people express a desire for some distance between top and bottom, they would rather live in considerably more equal societies than they do at present. Many would even opt for the more egalitarian society if the overall pie was smaller than in a less equal one.
We reiterate that this is the Financial Times talking, who are not widely regarded as bleeding hearts. We were like, Jaysus, they’ve gone red.
All the Financial Times stuff is paywalled, but a free subscription will get you access to some amount of content monthly, which is why we’re milking this article for everything we can get from it before the wall comes down.
The obvious point, which we’ve made before because it’s obvious, is that all of the ills afflicting the bottom 90% of our economic heap, and most especially the bottom 20%, getting worse as you burrow down, are the result of policy choices, either to do something that makes matters worse or to refrain from doing something to make them better.
Jacobin is a cheap date, $30/year, for which you get four massive print issues annually along with all the between-issues writing, which is substantial. Probably we don’t know anyone who will agree with their stances entirely, but getting a perspective outside what you’ll see in the workaday publications most of us read on the regular is valuable, it really is. A digital-only subscription is $20/annually, but it’s nice to have a hard copy you needn’t read on the phone or computer.7
Neptune, baby!8
NASA is crashing a small spacecraft travelling at 14,000 miles/hour into a relatively small asteroid to test how crashing a speedy rocket into an asteroid will affect the orbital path of the asteroid.9 This is to happen a bit after 7pm Eastern tonight, and you have options for watching it.10
We started out this post listening to McCoy Tyner, Work from Home with McCoy Tyner, which, great, McCoy Tyner is great and the album title is back to the future, but after it never stopped playing we looked and saw that it was four hours long, so we moved along to Hammond B3 maestro Jimmy Smith, “Sus Principios, 1982,” which we’d not heard and which we like, and which sadly only lasted a half hour.
Now we’re on to Michel Petrucciani with Steve Gadd & Anthony Jackson, Trio in Tokyo, who will will play us out.
And so they have done.
(We’re taking the music out of the parentheticals, as shown above.)
Once again, the Ludwig Institute on the true rate of unemployment.
The Financial Times on grotesque inequality in the U.S. and Britain.