captainsblog | Pennies from Hell. (Reply)

Another buttbunch of hockey games just got called off. The players didn't accept the NHL hardliners' final "take it or leave it" proposal to reduce their share of revenue from 57 percent (admittedly too high) to 50. When the players responded with three different ways of getting to 50 over a few years, ownership took all of ten minutes to reject all three; they have since refused any other efforts to resume negotiation, and have now taken their 50/50 split off the table. If the games are not rescheduled- and they almost certainly can't be unless a deal gets done next week- the players have already lost more in game checks than they would have lost if they'd taken the take-it-or-leave it.

In my world, this makes no sense. There are only six numbers between 50 and 57. You'd think two rooms full of __illionaires could figure that out and come up with a way of getting to 51, or 53, or any of the other four. Yet they impoverish related businesses, take productive years off the careers of their only real product, and piss off the fans.

All over pennies.

In large measure, the biggest real issue in the presidential election is also over pennies. Forget this fake Bengazi "scandal" crap and the binders and bayonets; it's the economy, stupid, and both sides have done a stupid job of handling it. At the heart of the whole thing is a whopping 4.6 percent difference in tax rates being proposed by the two sides. The President will sign a bill this afternoon which preserves the entire current income tax structure, including the early-2000 "Bush tax cuts," except for raising it by a measly not-even-nickel, from 35 to 39.6 percent, on every dollar earned by people over $250,000. He'd probably sign a bill if it put the cutoff at a million bucks. Democrats proposed both versions at the end of last year, and both got shot down. Instead, they somehow agreed on something called "sequestration," aka "the fiscal cliff," under which (or should I say over which) every taxpayer will have their rates go way up, and both military and social spending will be cut to the bone, if the two sides can't reach an agreement by the end of 2012.

All over pennies.

To understand why, you have to understand why the rich are not like you or me. The pennies are just as important to them as the Benjamins are. When I was a copy editor, one of the "common fallacies" in our stylebook was over use of the term "lion's share." Over time, it has come to mean "a lot of the pie," or "most of the pie," or "almost all of the pie." None of the above: in the original Aesop, it's made very clear that the "lion's share" is ALL OF IT. It's the principLE, rather than the penny-enny principAL, of those extra paltry cents; I don't need it, but damned if I'm gonna let YOU have it.

It explains the brinksmanship between players and owners, and between blue and red. Earlier this week, I read a piece which explains the why's of it better than anything I've ever read. It's TL;DR, but it helps explain why the mindset of the modern man of wealth is so different than the philanthropic minds of their just-as-rich counterparts of even the mid-20th century:

For most of our history, American economics, culture and politics have been dominated by a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values, educated at the Ivies and marinated in an ethic of noblesse oblige (the conviction that those who possess wealth and power are morally bound to use it for the betterment of society). While they've done their share of damage to the notion of democracy in the name of profit (as all financial elites inevitably do), this group has, for the most part, tempered its predatory instincts with a code that valued mass education and human rights; held up public service as both a duty and an honor; and imbued them with the belief that once you made your nut, you had a moral duty to do something positive with it for the betterment of mankind. Your own legacy depended on this.

Among the presidents, this strain gave us both Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, and Poppy Bush -- nerdy, wonky intellectuals who, for all their faults, at least took the business of good government seriously. Among financial elites, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet still both partake strongly of this traditional view of wealth as power to be used for good. Even if we don't like their specific choices, the core impulse to improve the world is a good one -- and one that's been conspicuously absent in other aristocratic cultures.

Which brings us to that other great historical American nobility -- the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain “order,” and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God.

As described by Colin Woodard in American Nations: The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, the elites of the Deep South are descended mainly from the owners of sugar, rum and cotton plantations from Barbados -- the younger sons of the British nobility who'd farmed up the Caribbean islands, and then came ashore to the southern coasts seeking more land. Woodward described the culture they created in the crescent stretching from Charleston, SC around to New Orleans this way:

It was a near-carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place notorious even then for its inhumanity....From the outset, Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror. Its expansionist ambitions would put it on a collision course with its Yankee rivals, triggering military, social, and political conflicts that continue to plague the United States to this day.

David Hackett Fischer, whose Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways In America informs both Lind's and Woodard's work, described just how deeply undemocratic the Southern aristocracy was, and still is. He documents how these elites have always feared and opposed universal literacy, public schools and libraries, and a free press. (Lind adds that they have historically been profoundly anti-technology as well, far preferring solutions that involve finding more serfs and throwing them at a problem whenever possible. Why buy a bulldozer when 150 convicts on a chain gang can grade your road instead?) Unlike the Puritan elites, who wore their wealth modestly and dedicated themselves to the common good, Southern elites sank their money into ostentatious homes and clothing and the pursuit of pleasure -- including lavish parties, games of fortune, predatory sexual conquests, and blood sports involving ritualized animal abuse spectacles.

And, apparently, hockey matches.

These are the alpha males who can't compromise, who insist on the Lion's Share as what it really is. In ten days, we will decide whether to put one of them in charge for at least four years, with the influence of his Supreme Court appointments probably outlasting me. I see a government manned by these "Achievers" and "Job Creators," mindful that they are entirely focused on achieving and creating for themselves.

We'll be lucky if we're tossed a penny or two.