Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand Hates Tuscaloosa . . . And You Too Joplin

allow me to introduce myself…

I’ve entertained the idea of writing a book for some time now, even going as far as to do a good bit of research on various subjects.  This wasn’t my first idea for a book, but it had the most sticking power.

My wife had listened to all my grand schemes and wonderful ideas which always seemed to fall by the wayside.  It is certainly understandable to expect eye rolls after many starts that withered on the vine.

But this idea was different, it was relevant because it was so personal.  When the devastating tornado hit Tuscaloosa I was heart sick and fretted for my friends who lived there.  After all of my circle were accounted for, it became obvious that Tuscaloosa would never be the same physically in addition to emotionally. The bitter irony of the disconnect between the needs of the people of Tuscaloosa (and the any other town that suffers tragedy of this magnitude) and the political preferences disturbed me.

Here Tuscaloosa sat in rubble, crying for help to the very government so many there claim to despise.  The governor, Robert Bentley, had campaigned on the “Tenth Amendment” meaning he refused to yield any power to the federal government that wasn’t strictly enumerated in the constitution.  Yet there he was asking for help from FEMA and other agencies, that are not justified by the Tenth Amendment.

One can overlook his immediate hypocrisy, but it would be foolhardy to ignore the rhetoric coming from the conservative movement in the United States.  They aren’t as hypocritical and their sincerity poses a danger to all of the future Tuscaloosa’s out there, along with any other component of the downtrodden.

That’s when the idea for the book hit me. The hook was obvious to me; the political loyalties of Tuscaloosa and the rest of red state America was to the Republican Party, and the Republican Party’s loyalty was to Ayn Rand.

I was very familiar with Ayn Rand, having read “Atlas Shrugged” about twenty years ago.  I found it hard to understand, as her writing style was obtuse to say the least, but the parts I did understand disgusted me.

That in and of itself wouldn’t surprise someone who didn’t know me except through the context of this book, as I identify myself as a somewhat liberal voter.  But to those who have known me all of my life, including almost all in Tuscaloosa who know me, there ought to be an element of shock.

I was as extreme right wing as a person could be, up until 2007.  I was not a casual conservative; I found Rush Limbaugh too shallow and redundant.  All he ever did in my mind was read the editorials I had already read.  His analysis left a great deal to be desired in my mind.  I wanted the hard stuff.  I read every book by Milton Friedman I could find (and understand).  I subscribed to the National Review for about 15 years, the Wall Street Journal for about half that long.

When I turned 18, I mourned the fact that my birthday fell too late for me to vote for Ronald Reagan’s first term.  I did celebrate the fact that I helped to give him the huge landslide over Walter Mondale in 1984 with my vote.  I have never in my life voted for a Democrat as president, including in the last election.  I voted for John McCain, in spite of the not insignificant reservations about McCain’s ability to lead us through the financial mess  and of course,Sarah Palin.  I still had enough Republican in me to vote for him and his service to our country in Viet Nam was something I valued highly and I felt it reflected well upon his character.   I now regret my vote, not because my vote made any great difference in the grand scheme, but because I realized shortly thereafter that I could no longer justify internally all of my previous votes for conservative principles.

There is no small amount of embarrassment in me confessing this, but at one time I was a fan of Pat Buchanan, as I felt he was one of the few true conservatives in the public eye.  I still feel more confident that Pat Buchanan is the purest conservative, but it is no longer a selling point with me, it’s a reason to avoid him.

I cannot attribute my conversion to a more progressive worldview completely to the events of the day, namely the financial crisis of 2008.  That certainly played a significant role in my transformation, but it was not the turning point. Events in my private life drove my change of heart more than what I read in the newspapers did.

I was attending the University of Alabama around that time as I was taking graduate courses in political science while working at the Mercedes Benz production facility in Vance, Alabama concurrently.  I worked for a contractor as a manager, despite the fact that I knew little or nothing about automobile production and after three years working there I probably know even less.  I did become aware of the lives of my employees; almost all of them were extremely poor and uneducated.   I saw the lives of people up close and realized that the blame for their lives that myself and all good conservatives assign to the poor wasn’t really justified.

I witnessed the working poor at the most personal level, as most had no insurance or chances at it.  Within my first month of working at Mercedes, one of my employees died of a heart attack at 40 years old.  She had complained during our lunch hour every night about chest pains, but couldn’t afford to see a doctor. I understand that her family had to wait two to three weeks to bury her because of financial difficulties. Donations had to come from her extended family to help with the cost.

I also found out that one of my employees, one of my favorites, had been living in a trailer for four months with no power.  If you spent any time in Alabama in the summer, you would know that it is almost unbearable even with power and air conditioning.  This man and his family lived in a trailer with no power and cooked on the dirt outside with cans of Sterno.

A friend and I paid off the electrical deposit and I arranged the power hook up.  The employee did not even have the wherewithal to arrange it himself, as he was baffled by the system.  He also didn’t know how to apply for food stamps, with which I assisted him.

I then realized that not all of the poor on welfare were gaming the system.  Sure, there was, is and always will be fraud, but many are not educated enough to take advantage of loopholes.  Many are actually honest!  I found this to be the most surprising counter to my previous prejudices.

About this time the bottom dropped out of the economy, and I saw the Republican Party’s solution to be…well, I wasn’t sure what it was.  Tax cuts were involved, I do remember that.  Tax cuts cure all in the world of the Republicans. I am pretty sure the Republicans believe that diabetes, cancer and AIDS can all be cured with enough tax cutting.

The idea of bailouts disgusted me, but I felt strongly that the doomsayers were correct; the entire system would collapse without capitalization through the injections of massive amounts of money.  I knew enough history of the Great Depression to hope for capital injections; and I hoped that they would be followed by massive regulations of the financial industry such as Franklin Roosevelt brought with Glass-Steagall Act.

The Republicans turned out to protest the bailouts and then also the regulations that would reduce the chances of more bailouts. They complained about the fire, but refused to put the matches out of reach for the arsonists.

Republican governors refused stimulus money for unemployment benefits for purely political reasons; while they were cheered by “true conservatives”.  All of this happened as I saw friends at Mercedes by the hundreds lose their jobs in the financial crisis.  Most of these people had enthusiastically embraced their jobs as “good jobs”.  Indeed they were at one time, as they were a chance for poor, relatively uneducated Alabamians to achieve middle class status.

But I also witnessed Mercedes go from a good job to borderline exploitation.  Mercedes came to Alabama because of tax credits; millions of dollars worth.  Economists say that Alabama paid $177,000 per job to Mercedes.

I know hundreds who have worked and still work there, and I have been told this by too many to discount it.  The pay rate while Mercedes was still beholden to the state of Alabama was phenomenal.  The job carried full benefits and a top wage rate of slightly less than thirty dollars per hour.  This was to demonstrate that unions were not necessary and that it was possible to have good jobs without collective bargaining.

But as the contractual agreement with the state of Alabama expired, Mercedes shifted its hiring of employees from the state’s employment office to a temporary employment service.  All new employees were required to be vetted through the temp service.  They had no rights, no insurance to speak of, and could be dismissed for any trivial reason.  The temp status was one that was limbo, lasting several years for some.  All temps start at approximately $14 hour or so; more than ten bucks per hour less than their full time counterparts.   The temp agency is contracted three years at a time, and when it rolls over, the temps lose any seniority and start over again at day one as far as Mercedes was concerned.  Mercedes temps do the same jobs that the full timers do, with much lower pay, less job security, almost zero health coverage, and the risk of repetitive stress injuries among other workplace hazards (which are certainly real, based on personal observations).  Who needs unions?

Mercedes aggressively worked to buy out the old timers, giving them generous buy outs to leave.  Then they could move temps up into their slots for much less.  As the old timers leave through retirement or attrition, no full time people are hired to replace them.

This is the good job that lures locals desperate for work.  Life for the contractors is much worse. The pay rate is much less, and the work conditions are less than accommodating.  I witnessed many practices that violated my conscience.  As a manager, I had some flexibility in protecting my employees.  For example, it is customary in the auto industry to deny holiday pay if a worker is absent for the shift before or after the holiday.  This is to prevent massive call-ins so the workers might take an unauthorized extra vacation day.

As we prepared for Thanksgiving shutdown one year, I was told that the home office wished to send any extra workers home to save labor.  I was also told that once that happened, the home office would dock the holiday pay of the worker, as they had not fully worked the shift before.   This in the name of profit for the company, but at the expense of those who struggled to feed families on $9 per hour.  Other managers and myself found work for all our people to do, which might have included sitting at a table talking to me about football.

Incidentally, Mercedes has never had a vote for union.  It’s a moot point now as the only ones that can effectively unionize, the old timers, won’t as they have great benefits; while those who need unions, the temps, have absolutely no way to do so.  They are completely expendable.  Which is the way Mercedes wants it. This is only anecdotal, but everyone I have asked who works at Mercedes tell me they would vote union if they had it to do it all again.

I came to realize that this was the way that most all businesses want it.  Lower wages and a “traumatized” workforce.  The expression traumatized is in quotations because it was a term promoted by Alan Greenspan.  He celebrated the notion of a traumatized worker that had too much fear to ask for a wage increase.  Alan noted that the tradeoff between full employment and inflation had now been made obsolete.  In the old days, it was thought that if employment were close to 100%, all the good workers would shop around and ask for mo’ money.  That would drive inflation. But in the eighties, Greenspan noticed that fears of outsourcing, the destruction of unions, and technology made every worker traumatized and in fear of his or her job, no matter how crappy it was.

Who does this benefit?  The corporations, with the corporations strictly being defined as shareholders-not necessarily the people who make up the corporation.  It benefits those on Wall Street who invest and speculate, as it boosts profit margins.  Meanwhile wages for the little guy drop and drop and drop.   Mercedes Benz in Vance, AL is a small example of what has taken place across America.  Now you have no chance at a comfortable life, college for your children, and even basic healthcare unless you have a white collar job.  Chances are if you have a white collar job you were lucky enough to be born into a family of white collars.  It’s a destructive cycle and it is more than a little disheartening to see it happen to people you know and love.

But those people vote against their interest, as they identify themselves as conservative and believe what Fox News tells them about the glories of capitalism.  The average working man can’t define socialism, but he knows it is bad, and best he can tell, based on what Fox News and Rush tell him, socialism is anything that interferes with business. It is the classic frog in the water.  He never feels the temperature rising and by the time it is boiling; he’s dead.

The tornado should drive this point home, but I don’t see any evidence of it in Tuscaloosa.  The average person identifies himself as a “conservative” and therefore he or she is resistant to anything that challenges the status quo.  Which is exactly what Mercedes, the Republicans and Ayn Rand want.  The status quo is being run in a manner where the little man is of no consequence, but only the wealthy who create these low paying jobs.

So for whom is this book written?  Allow me to break down society in five compartments by political leanings.  The world isn’t just right and left; or even right and left and middle.  There are five categories:

1) Strongly liberal- will vote liberal in all things

2) Mostly liberal- will vote liberal for his/her interest

3) Independents/Neutrals- the largest group typically disinterested, uninformed and cynical about the whole process.

4) Mostly conservative- will vote conservative for his/her interest

5) Strongly conservative- will vote conservatives in all things

I would love to change everyone’s mind, but that is a fantasy.  Political views are deeply and strongly held and people such as me are rare. Not many people change political views in their forties; particularly going from right to left.  So as a former number 5, I can tell you the hard core conservatives will not change.  Therefore I wish to reach the 3’s, the people who are detached.  They are the most important people in the world now.  I truly believe we are at a cross roads for this country and if the system is to work there has to be more input from the number 3’s.

So with that in mind, I write for the middle.  I hope that the writing is effective, and to be effective in my mind it has to entertain as well as educate.  I’ve tried to enlighten and illuminate with multiple sources, all of them linked if possible.  I have tried to do it in a style that is non threatening and colloquial.  So you will notice this isn’t exactly an academic work.  That doesn’t diminish the importance of my intended purpose, it is merely my attempt to motivate the audience that our country needs at this point.

To you who are truly open to new ideas, all I ask is for you to read and examine my points.  Every day there are fresh stories in the news that should disturb you.  As I am writing this, the Occupy Wall Street movement is in its second month or so.  These people completely independent of me have noted the same things I have in this book.  They are taking action the best way they know how.  Don’t be put off by pierced noses or drum lines and just dismiss them as weird.  Read my book and listen to what we all say. If you think my words aren’t factual or logical, then go back to your previous condition.  If you happen to come to believe things are worse than you thought, then join me in this fight to take back our country.

george kelley

nashville, tennessee

november 9, 2011