STIMULUS-FUNDING: A HEN-YARD WITH NO PECKING ORDER

Studies of animal behavior have discovered something about that behavior that also seems to apply to human beings. They have observed that a barnyard with a number of chickens will engage in a great deal of conflict behavior when they are first put in that yard and whenever a handful of grain is thrown into their yard for them to eat. The feathers literally may fly as they contend in the game of who-gets-the-grain, their conflict often taking the form of violent pecks delivered against their opponents. After several repetitions of this situation, they will have established a “pecking order” in which each chicken “understands” exactly who can peck whom without fear of being pecked in return. Those in lower positions in the pecking order must content themselves with “pecking” (taking food from) those lower than themselves in that order. A kind of “social peace” comes thus to prevail.

Sociologists have seen this hen-yard behavior as symbolic to what happens in human economies where people compete with one another for scarce opportunities for consumption of whatever are deemed the “good things” of their economy. With a finite amount of national income, it will be distributed disproportionately toward those at the higher end of the pecking order and those at lower levels seldom rebel against the inequality of income distribution, accepting the “pecks” of the more fortunate in asserting that the more deprived are less deserving of income than those above them in the hierarchy. Rebellions against inequality do happen, of course, as when in Animal Farm a rabble-rousing animal group (the pigs) rebel against the farmer’s dominance over the barnyard rabble, making as the slogan of their revolution that “All Animals Are Equal;” only later when a new pecking order with themselves as the peckers substituting the slogan that “Pigs are More Equal.”

Neo-liberal class relations in the world today can be seen as a kind of equilibrium in which the masses of the “pecked” (deprived) people of the world have acquiesced in the system that keeps them under; but may now be in the process of growing rebellion against the pecking order of the world hen-yard. The meltdown of the world financial system has shown for all to see that the Emperors of the Financial World, whose dominance was supposed to “float all boats” under their pecking dominance, are indeed wearing only the clothes of banksters like Bernie Madoff whose devious operations benefit not the peace and prosperity of the hen-yard generally but only of their particular “animal species.” Protesters are banging pots and pans and bringing down a government in Iceland, shaking the social order in France and Greece and many other places. Only in the United States is “pig” dominance not yet strongly challenged. But courtesy the “bailout” and the “stimulus bill” about to be implemented in America, even that may change and bring forth a new orgy of pecking conflict in the United States.

Consider first the bailout of selected investment institutions. By all accounts this is producing an unprecedented level of anger that the government is providing relief for those least deserving of it, those whose incompetence and fraudulence created the financial crisis…and that it is being administered, no less, by the same Chicago school economists, associates of Robert Rubin, whose neo-liberal faith in the self-governing nature of “free markets” in the lending industry got us into the mess. The anger level requisite to an uprising is there, but I think the other prong of economy recovery, the stimulus spending on infrastructure repair and expansion projects, will add another critical component to the coming revolt of the lowly “barn yard animals.”

In the recessionary economy into which the United States has now fallen, much hope is beingplaced with the enhanced “federal assistance” to “job producing” projects that is the heart of the stimulus bill. States, cities and other local municipalities have long since prepared their “wish lists” of what they want and say they both need and deserve in the way of such assistance: a new sewage system in this town, a new school building to replace a crumbling one, a bullet train from LA to Las Vegas, whatever. The problem here is that the handful of “food” being thrown into the barnyard of America could in no way “feed” or fill all these wish lists, any more than Santa Claus could bring a children every one of the hundreds of items he/she checked off from the J.C. Penney catalog. One Michigan political observer put it this way: “We have far more in the way of projects that are ready to go than we have money to fund them. And it’s naïve to expect that politics will not be part of the process.” So what we shall see ahead will be an intense period of political struggle, in which the winners will be happy enough, but the losers will harbor bad feelings of the “injustice” by which they were denied opportunities to feed on the new handful of nourishment.

Built on top of this spate of conflict between competing recipients of stimulus funding will be a spectacular increase in opportunities for those who compete to engage in “politics” as this is often popularly understand, as the use of influence of, let’s say “Blue” states which voted for the Democrats to have more political peck-clout than the “Red” ones which voted for the Republicans: a likelihood compounded by the almost-unanimous Republican votes in Congress against the stimulus package. When funds are finally allocated, further “politics” will come into play at the local level where many of the decisions about what companies are to benefit from contracts to do this work must be determined by local authorities. Who will get the contract to build a new sewer system for a town or reconstruct a city’s crumbling bridge? At this point the likelihood of corrupt relations between officials and developers and other contractors will dramatically escalate. Some of this corruption will be “legal” in that contracts will go to those agencies that have contributed to the campaigns in which these officials have been elected. Some will be more in the “pay for play” arrangements which have already opened a direct path between prisons and the statehouses and city and county chambers for those officials caught in the “scandal” of having used their offices to enrich themselves through these allocative decisions. If there remains any public faith in the ability and will of their public officials to conduct business in the interest of the public rather than themselves and their cronies, that faith will be further shaken as more and more officials join this parade from the public chamber to the jail.

I’m postulating a doomsday scenario in which the bond of public trust which is the basis of the social compact that allows peace in the hen-yard (world) is ruptured by the sense of injustice in the distribution of social amenities. As Scrooge asked the Ghost of Christmas Future if the dire consequences of his sin that were being displayed were inevitable or simply tendencies which could yet be reversed, we might ask whether the future of severe conflict that I am picturing has to be or is merely a “tendency.” As actually an optimist, I am one who would say that these things need not happen: that we can, for example, find equitable and legitimate ways to distribute construction contracts if equity and due process are built into the system of that distribution. As a realist, however, I would say that if we repeat the gross injustice and incompetence displayed, for example, in the “reconstruction” projects in Iraq or New Orleans, there is an all-too-real possibility of the worst case scenario for this hen-yard of a world will become the reality of that world.

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Jerry D. Rose – Editor, The Sun State Activist