I feel guilty about using the tragedy of the Party of the Right threesome gone very wrong to promote my own work, but here are two memoirs of my time in and around the POR.

“I was a teen-age reactionary” (Bad Subjects)

“Partying on the right” (The Nation)

Me in the late 1990s, photographed by Joel Schalit in San Francisco

[Guest post by Adolph Reed, in response to Kristen McQueary’s column in the Chicago Tribune on how Chicago could use a Hurricane Katrina.]

Kristen McQueary’s attempt to walk back from her scurrilous column of last Thursday extolling the wonderful changes that the devastation of Katrina brought to New Orleans is basically an unpology—and an even more empty, uninformed word salad than the original. The issue isn’t what she was feeling when she wrote what she wrote; it’s what she wrote.

The initial column was wrong on basic, yet important particulars. New Orleanians did not “overthrow a corrupt government.” They actually re-elected Mayor Nagin, who then served his complete second term. He did not and could not by charter seek a third term. Mitch Landrieu did not replace him. Public housing did not get rebuilt; projects were demolished at the moment of the city’s greatest shortage of affordable housing to make way for upscale redevelopment and thereby further intensify that shortage.

I don’t know what governments she believes were consolidated, but the “slashed budget, forced unpaid furloughs, cut positions, detonated labor contracts” all actually began under Nagin. More to the point, however, what world does McQueary live in such that she imagines that those moves, which necessarily meant slashed public services and redoubled economic hardship for those workers and their families already reeling from the dislocation and loss associated with the flood of the city, sound like such cool ideas, even accomplishments? Sprinkling in empty references to “leaner and more efficient” tells us nothing; they’re only croutons in the standard free-market word salad.

And what notion of democratic government does she operate with such that Paul Vallas’s having been freed from “restrictive mandates from the city or the state” seems like something to be applauded? He may have “created the nation’s first free-market education system” (can someone pass the salad dressing?), but, if McQueary could imagine doing the most superficial research instead of merely exuberantly rehearsing press releases, she’d have learned that that system has not, even by the the education “reformers’” very dubious metric of standardized testing, improved educational performance overall and certainly has undermined educational quality for many students in the city. And what notion of education does she operate with such that teachers are not only least competent to organize conducting it but are somehow its enemies, though a random “entrepreneur” with no expertise is the one — actually The One — to whom that vital public service should be entrusted? God help us if McQueary starts thinking about how to organize the fire department.

There is much more that is wrong-headed and shallow about McQueary’s perspective. Considering Chicago, for instance, for all her recitation of the babble associated with the pose of tough-minded fiscal probity, it’s interesting that she never bothers to consider where the budget crisis came from, whose actions—and which actions—produced it, including the role of the City’s years of dereliction in not making its mandated pension payments or, on the other side of the ledger, the billions of dollars of revenue foregone for corporate tax giveaways and other forms of corporate welfare. It’s clear that McQueary can’t imagine herself as falling among the ranks of those who could wind up on the wrong side of the retrenchment that she airily touts with such blithe detachment, as though it were all a version of “Game of Thrones.”

I could go on, but I’ll conclude by saying that I certainly understand how anyone with connections to New Orleans and the devastating impact of that travesty wrought by decades of bad government would be appalled and outraged by her flippant statements like “Hurricane Katrina gave a great American city a rebirth.” I understand so well because I’m one of those people. But one doesn’t have to have that personal connection to recognize the truly breathtaking, perhaps clinical, lack of capacity for empathy with strangers that such statements undeniably reveal. The problem is not that one might think that she “would be gunning for actual death and destruction” but that what she is “gunning for” in wanting in effect to destroy the public interest by marketizing it is a society in which such “death and destruction” would become normal life.

The greatest irony of her original stupid article and the backtracking unapology is that she can’t recognize that it’s precisely the sort of arrangements she enthusiastically touts as the utopian possibilities opened by the horrors of Katrina that created that disaster in the first place. She’s right; it was man-made, but, if she were a little less smugly shallow and ideological, she might have asked how it was man-made. It was the product of decades of the sorts of policies, pursued at every level from Orleans Parish to the White House and by corporate Democrats as well as Republicans, she rhapsodizes about—privatization, retrenchment, corporate welfare paid for by cutting vital public services and pasting the moves over with fairy tales about “efficiency” and “lean management” and “doing more with less” and hoping to avoid the day of reckoning.

So, I’ll give this much to McQueary; she’s right that Katrina has a lesson for us. It’s a lesson about what happens when you follow the sorts of destructive approaches to public policy that McQueary shills for.

Paul Mason has a breathless piece in The Guardian making grand New Economy claims that sound like recycled propaganda from the late-1990s—though he gives them a left spin: postmateriality is already liberating us. I wrote a book that was in large part about all that ideological froth, published in 2003, and so far I’ve been struck by the nonrevival of that discourse despite a new tech bubble. Uber and Snapchat don’t excite the same Utopian passions that the initial massification of the web did.

I’ll pass on refuting Mason’s article, because I already did that twelve years ago. But I do want to comment on one point that Mason makes—one that’s ubiquitous in a lot of economic commentary today: capitalists don’t need workers anymore. As he puts it:

Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

I can’t make sense of the “currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences”—has capitalism ever skipped an innovation because of its social consequences?—but there’s no evidence that info tech is “hugely diminish[ing] the amount of work needed.” Sure, wages and benefits stink, but that’s about politics and class power, not because of the latest generation of Intel chips or something fresh out of the latest TechCrunch Disrupt.

Expressing this argument in some economically quantifiable way probably means something like “the relation between GDP growth and employment growth has broken down.” If that’s what proponents mean—the presentations are usually light on precision—then it’s just not true.

Graphed below is the yearly growth in employment, and what the growth in employment “should” be based on GDP growth (lagged a quarter). Below it is the difference between the two—a measure of whether actual employment growth is stronger or weaker than the very simple model suggests. Several things stand out:

• The relationship between GDP growth and employment growth is very tight.
• It hasn’t gotten any less tight. Employment losses during the Great Recession were greater than the contraction in GDP says they should have been, but not by much, and the model tracks actual results, both down and up, remarkably well.
• Recent employment growth is stronger than the model suggests it should be. For the first quarter, average U.S. monthly employment gains during the first quarter of 2015 “should” have been 163,000, and not the 253,000 they were.

Put another way, were IT really making workers less necessary, we should be seeing more productivity growth, and not less. But less is precisely what we’re seeing—as of the first quarter of 2015, trend productivity growth was 0.4%, an all-time low since the series began in 1948, less than a fifth the 1948–2007 average of 2.3%. It’s below the levels of the lamented 1970s productivity slowdown. The only time in recent history where IT appears to have led to an acceleration in productivity growth was the late 1990s, which was the result of increased investment in high-tech equipment. I went into writing After the New Economy thinking that the productivity acceleration was a mirage, but it wasn’t. But then it fell apart, because corporations prefer shoveling out cash to their shareholders to investing it.

A follow-up to my last post. I asked Yanis Varoufakis what we should make of talk about Tsipras having marginalized him. His answer: “A first class example of coordinated disinformation at a global scale!”

I emailed Yanis Varoufakis last night and asked how he was holding up. To my surprise, he answered:

“[W]e certainly are facing a coup. The wall of lies is becoming absurdly tall.”

Good lord, Hillary’s announcement video is appallingly banal. As someone said on my Facebook page, it’s like an old United Colors of Benetton ad. For perspective, here’s Carl Bernstein’s description of Bill’s first inauguration:

Every opportunity was exploited to contrast the egalitarian values and youth of the Clintons with the privileged era of Reagan and Bush, a plutocratic epoch that Hillary, more than Bill, believed was now in final retreat; and to proclaim a transparency in government that would extinguish all vestiges of Nixonian secrecy and paranoia in the White House. The tab for the week of celebration was fit for a pasha, running to more than $25 million, a record unsurpassed until George W. Bush’s $40 million extravaganza in 2000. Most of it was financed by the same kind of special interest and corporate back-scratching that had long paid the bills for Republican presidential campaigns and inaugurations. The new Democratic president seemed to justify it because of the “new direction” of his leadership. The explanation, with its attendant sense of entitlement, sounded positively Hillaryesque. Hillary thought the price in dollars was justified by the all-embracing message of every theme tent on the Mall, including Native American heritage, gay rights, country music, clog dancers, wood choppers, and unionized stevedores.

There was a marching band whose members were all physically disabled; there were 120 men and women carrying an oversized section of the AIDS memorial quilt; there was a float celebrating American family life that included a lesbian couple and two gay men; another featured an Elvis impersonator (and members of the King’s original band). As the twenty-two-unit Lesbian and Gay Bands of America passed the reviewing stand, the new president and vice president each held up three fingers — a sign-language salute to the marchers meaning “I love you.”