Doom Report (Week 49: Do you know how long it takes a working man to save $5,000?)

During the holiday season, many people like to watch It’s a Wonderful Life.  I don’t care for it personally—too sappy for my tastes—but I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum.  Although I’d like to note that critics at the time agreed with me—the story of how it became a beloved Christmas classic is a fascinating one.  But certainly Robert Reich really likes it, as he’s noted many times in various videos and on the Coffee Klatch.  And, this year, he’s offering us a video where he uses the Frank Capra classic to illustrate the problems with wealth inequalities.  He focuses on a scene where George (played by Jimmy Stewart) challenges the assumptions of the greedy Mr. Potter, who views the ordinary citizens of Bedford Falls as resources to be exploited.  And Reich, turned black-and-white and digitally inserted into the scene, interrupts to make comments such as this one:

George is right.  When working people get a shot at a decent life and at better jobs with higher wages, they have more money to spend.  That spending grows the economy and helps businesses thrive, creating more jobs.  It’s a virtuous cycle.

and this one:

Here’s the point that Mr. Potter never understood.  Even wealthy people like him do better with a smaller share of an economy growing rapidly because everyone is doing better, than with a bigger share of an economy growing slowly because so many are barely making it.

Geez.  No wonder that, as the story of the film I linked above notes:

... the FBI and Senator McCarthy’s paranoid House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) even investigated It’s a Wonderful Life for allegedly having communist leanings.  They viewed the film’s protagonist George Bailey’s story to be rife with subversive tendencies such as demonising capitalist bankers, and including subtle attempts to magnify the problems of the ‘common man’ in society.

I guess McCarthy would be pretty damned happy with our situation today.  (Certainly, he would have been a Trump fan, what with Trump having been mentored by McCarthy’s old buddy Roy Cohn.)  The capitalist bankers are still occasionally demonized, I suppose, but that doesn’t matter, since they can make as much money as they like, crash the economy with no consequences, break the law without facing any accountability, and receive government bailouts that they use to pay executive bonuses.  And the problems of the common man?  Why, even the Democrats seem to be stuck in a mode of trying to convince the common man that they just don’t understand how good they got it.

And, look, I’d actually love to blame this all on the greed of the billionaire class, but I don’t think it’s that simple.  I think a big part of it is something I just heard from Gary Stevenson this week, even though it’s from an interview he did earlier in the year.  The channel he did it on decided to repost it as an end-of-year treat, and I’m so glad they did: Gary’s plain-spoken way of breaking down the complexities of our economic situation never fails to enlighten.  And, in this interview, right near the beginning, he points out that a big part of the problem is that economists are all from wealthy backgrounds.

So, what kind of people go into that world?  If you actually look, economics PhD is the least social-class-representative PhD in the whole country.  And it’s obvious why, because if you’re poor and you’ve got a very good economics degree, you’d be kind of mad to do a PhD, because you can make so much more money in the city, right?  And then the end result is—it drives me mad—I did this two-year masters at Oxford; you know, it’s like a hundred posh people in a building talking about how’s the economy working while inequality is going like that, which means that their lives are becoming unbelievably richer, poor people are struggling to eat, and they’re just saying everything’s fine.

Not saying that excuses the behavior, of course, but at least maybe it helps explain it.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Adam Kinzinger has a whole slew of really great videos this week.  He discusses Trump’s successful takeover of 60 Minutes, he explains why the regime dropped most of the Epstein files on the day before Christmas Eve, and of course the usual excellent week in review.

• Jimmy Kimmel did a holiday message for Channel 4 in the UK.  I thought it was quite lovely.

• Josh Johnson has an extremely hilarious take on the recent Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles.

This wasn’t technically last week, but I just got around to watching the episode of Alive with Steve Burns where he interviews Daryl Davis, a black man who’s made something of a career of sitting down and talking with KKK members.  Now, Steve’s new podcast (which I’ve mentioned before, back in weeks 35 and 36) has had some great guests, and the conversation is always interesting, but this one is just incredible.  I had never heard of Davis before, but trust me when I tell you that his story is insane, fascinating, and inspirational all in one.  Apparently he’s on a mission to deconvert the entire Klan, one member at a time, and he’s making a serious dent.  Here’s how he explains how he does it:

So, you you’ve heard the saying “one’s perception is one’s reality.”  Okay, so, that’s true.  Whatever somebody perceives becomes their reality.  Even if it’s not real, it’s their reality.  Keep in mind you cannot change anyone’s reality.  All right?  What is real to them is real to them: you you cannot change it.  And if you try to change somebody’s reality, you’re going to get resistance, because they believe whatever it is they think is real and you’re going to get pushback, okay?  What you do is, you offer them a different perception, or perceptions, plural.  If they resonate with one of those perceptions, then they will change their own reality because their perception becomes their reality.

And if a black man convincing over 200 Klansmen to hang up their robes isn’t a message of hope, then I don’t know what is.  Happy holidays.