The rise of the leisure class

The lives and personal dreams of Americans that have been financially ruined in the last two months seem to be getting as much attention by the pundits and their bosses as American soldiers killed or wounded in Iraq.

The media manipulators and the oil barons in the White House have hidden the horrible truth of that war for all these years. No photos of coffins and cemeteries, no consistent coverage of military hospitals and rehabilitation centers, no accurate count of Iraqi civilian dead.

And so far the only person who’s consistently talked about the personal tragedies of possibly millions of jobless or financially weakened American families is President-elect Barack Obama, who mentions them in every speech and talk he makes.

Why do human calamities warrant so little attention? While not looking for a scapegoat, the evidence is mounting that this recession/depression has been visited upon us by the infantilism and excess of what economic satirist Thorstein Veblen called famously the Leisure Class, and the aspirations it champions in our culture.

The leisure class is a strata of globalized American society. It doesn’t plague many small towns and cities like ours, but it does seem to operate in the abstract land of world financial markets and news.

The leisure class, to which many Americans belong, is composed of what might be called the unaccountable, non-working wealthy. By that I don’t mean the leisured don’t have to go to work, but the kind of work they do is more akin to recreation and gaming, especially in the financial sector, than it is to labor. Most of its products are what Veblen called “non-productive.”

And while the leisure class globally has no sense of noblesse oblige, no feelings of great responsibility to the whole, this does not seem to be generally so of local leaders and their monied backers. But that view might prove to be naive in the future as the recession rolls on.

The leisured really do sit upon the boards and have the keys to the executive washrooms of the nation, they really do hold the financial power, and own most of news outlets, and they don’t want us to know too much about the war and the terrible worry, poverty, and financial trauma that so many Americans are facing this Christmas and in the years ahead. They have the power and they don’t want to be blamed.

The basic financial virtues of thrift, avoidance of debt, and saving for a rainy day are not in the intellectual or moral perspective of leisure class gamblers. And they prefer others not knowing this.

When the Federal Reserve refused last week to release the names of companies that had received nearly $2 trillion in what Bloomberg News called “emergency loans from U.S. Taxpayers” and what assets the Fed is accepting as collateral, the leisure class was once again protecting its flank. And although Bloomberg News cared enough to ask the question, reflecting perhaps the pragmatism of its owner, the rest of us remain left in the dark about how our public money is spent. We’re not talking about a few Reaganesque welfare cheaters here, but an entire social class, the members of which feel we owe them a very good living. And they don’t really give a hoot about us.

This evasion of accountability was modeled nearly eight years ago when Vice President Cheney refused to release the names of the companies and their leaders who created the Bush administration’s backward and debilitating energy policy. Cheney never relented, protecting the leaders of his class right to the Supreme Court who backed him. And so it has gone for open government when its run by the leisured elite.

In New Mexico, we see small businesses closing and big businesses laying off employees all the time. If you’re a single mother, with little savings, returning to get a college degree to better yourself and your family’s fortunes, and you lose your job, chances are chronic anxious depression and a sense of disorienting hopelessness could set in, as I’ve seen with a number of people I know. The pain of losing your job is staggering, almost as debilitating as a bad medical diagnosis.

And the pain of this financial grinding is made worse by the knowledge that it didn’t need to happen at all, that it is the work of thousands who made out like bandits over the decade, literally robbed us all blind, and brought the American economy to its knees.

So many of us are suffering because we were betrayed by the leaders who arose from the leisure class to run our banks, our government, and our big corporations, who ran them rather like casinos with the inside tips of economic soothsayers that proved as useful in the long run as commentary from sheep entrails.

When Thorstein Veblen defined the “leisure class” in the mid l920s, he also coined the term “conspicuous consumption” and, what some now call, competitive consumption.

The leisure class has only a very few occupations that it finds suitable for its members — hoodwinking and bossing around the working classes, and gambling. Gambling on a gigantic scale that markets and market sectors will go up or down, using major banks and state and federal regulators as your bookies, leads to economies dedicated to “unproductive consumption of goods” and time, which they see as an “honorable” way of life.

As Veblen wrote “The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure… not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption undergoes a specialization as regards the quality of goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accouterments, amusements amulets and idols or divinities.”

“To gain access to the class,” Veblen writes, “the candidate must be gifted with clannishness, massiveness, ferocity, unscrupulousness, and tenacity of purpose.” The leisure class has one goal the accumulation and continued tenure of wealth and to prevail in our “predatory culture.”

“The ideal pecuniary man,” in the leisure class, Veblen writes, “is like the ideal delinquent in his unscrupulous conversion of goods and persons to his own ends, and in the callous disregard of the feelings and wishes of others…”

It seems like mammon is the guiding spirit of such people, and mammon demands sacrifices from the “lower orders,” as most of us know only too well this holiday season.