MMT Says the Government Owns Everything, Including Us

Leftists love to call government officials “our employees,” but Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), as voiced by Stephanie Kelton in her book, The Deficit Myth, would make government our owners. Indeed, they take the position that government already owns us and that MMT would just recognize the fact and allow us to buy some nicer things. Every progressive should reject MMT as a fascist power-grab rather than embrace it as horn of plenty. It will bring plenty, of course: plenty of misery. This article shows why.

Stephanie Kelton spends nearly half of The Deficit Myth talking about all the economic problems our country has, and she seems to offer solutions to them by freeing Congress from having to worry about money. She speaks in all the liberal platitudes that progressives should have learned to distrust, yet they buy it from her. Ironically, it is her central thesis that government does not look to the people for its money but rather prints it off as a “sovereign currency issuer” that is so dangerous. Government obeys citizens because they hold the purse strings. Anything freeing government from that is inherently dangerous and anti-democratic.

It isn’t clear whether Kelton would deny asserting that government owns everything, but she is careful to hide the true impact of her theories. Let’s look more closely at the mechanics of what she’s serving up.

Even in the introduction, Kelton offers this “Copernican” insight and “shift” in thinking: “It is the currency issuer – the federal government itself – not the taxpayer, that finances all government expenditures….the idea that taxes pay for what the government spends is pure fantasy.”

As a “sovereign currency issuer,” Kelton assures us throughout her book, the U.S. government is free from the restrictions faced by mere currency users. It can “never run out of money,” she says perhaps a thousand times, as long as it is using dollars. And of course in the U.S., the dollar is “legal tender for all debts, public and private.” Thus the plain impact of Kelton’s assertions is that the government can print all the money it wants and buy everything. But as she “assures” us, it doesn’t even need to do this. It doesn’t need dollars because it already owns everything. It merely creates dollars to motivate people to “provision” it with the things it needs.

Kelton introduces one of her heroes, Warren Mosler, a “successful Wall Street investor” as “the father of MMT.” (One could wonder why a Wall Street investor’s insights occupy such a happy place in the minds of progressives.) Mosler’s insight is that the government buys first and worries about money later, if at all. It taxes, but it doesn’t use the tax money to pay for things because it already owns all the money. It “wants to provision itself,” and taxes are the way it “gets people working and producing things for the government.”

Does that not sound like the government owns and manipulates its citizens?

To drill the point home, Kelton tells a sickening story about Mosler’s home life. She thinks it’s heartwarming, presumably, but consider the totalitarian nature of it as applied to U.S. citizens (as she intends it to be applied).

Mosler had a beautiful beachfront property with a swimming pool and all the luxuries of life anyone could hope to enjoy. He also had a family that included two young kids. To illustrate his point, he told me a story about the time he sat his kids down and told them he wanted them to do their part to help keep the place clean and habitable. He wanted the yard mowed, beds made, dishes done, cars washed, and so on. To compensate them for their time, he offered to pay them for their labor.

He offered to pay them with his business cards, and it turned out his kids did not value those things. When the mystified pater familias asked his children why they hadn’t done all the work he’d offered to pay them for, they explained that his cards weren’t worth a damn to them.

That’s when Mosler had his epiphany. The kids hadn’t done any chores because they didn’t need his cards. So he told the kids he wasn’t requiring them to do any work at all. All he wanted was a payment of thirty of his business cards each month. Failure to pay would result in a loss of privileges.

This insight, a mixture of bullying and manipulation, is the foundation of Mosler’s realization that government does not need to tax for money, but rather to force its citizens to work for it. This is the basis of MMT, and it firmly rests with Mosler’s ownership of the property in question and his parental authority over the (helpless) children within his control.

This story should make every progressive queasy: Kelton intends us to take the role of those children. WE are the ones being manipulated and controlled. You can hide the iron fist in a velvet glove, but this is the insight of MMT: Government owns everything, and we are its servants.

The founders would have probably hanged Stephanie Kelton as a traitor. They would certainly have recognized her idea as completely subversive of any concept of a limited federal government.

Let’s take a step back and look at the budgeting process Kelton repeated ridicules throughout her book. It is the process of government workers (Congresspeople, for the most part) who regard their budget as limited because they do not believe the government owns everything. Instead, they regard money as a resource commandeered from the people to be used for their benefit (to put a happy gloss on the admittedly sordid process). They realize they must account for the money they spend, and that the money must serve the people out of a budget transparently presented to the representatives of the people for an honest vote. This is the heart of the “deficit myth:” that government spending should be limited, transparent, and accountable.[1]

The reason there is such a thing as a government “deficit” is that people do recognize that the government does not own everything and is accountable to the people. Instead, resources are allocated to it by the people for use for specific purposes. When government borrows money, it should repay it – otherwise the money is a hidden tax on all of us. Deficits DO matter, therefore, because to the extent they exist and are allowed to persist, they represent an anti-democratic process.

MMT is designed to destroy the last vestiges of government accountability.

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[1] It would be naïve in the extreme to suggest that the use of fiat currency, which does indeed allow the government to create funding in an opaque way, does not blur the lines of this budgeting process as outlined. Indeed, fiat currency has had profoundly antidemocratic effect, many of which Kelton discusses in her book. Rather than solve these problems, however, MMT would complete the job of destroying the constraints that the federal government is currently obeying. Instead, she would create a “Fatherland” that, in the name of the federal government, owns everything and controls us in the way Mosler controlled and manipulated his children.

When the Cows Come Home – MMT and Inflation

Contrary to what Stephanie Kelton and others in the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) crowd suggest, fiat currency is not a new thing. It has often been tried and has ALWAYS resulted in the destruction of the currency, usually wreaking profound or life-threatening damage on the nation using it as well. It isn’t just that the money becomes worthless, as it inevitably does, it’s that it causes tremendous misallocation of resources and waste that destroy the economy before that happens. In this article we discuss the way MMT would hasten the doom of the dollar. In some ways, it is a simple story.

Straight, no Chaser

To put it in the simplest, and yet most sophisticated way, the United States currently has a federal debt of approximately 22 trillion dollars and rising swiftly. That is, there are 22 trillion dollars being held in the form of debt instruments and collecting interest at a small rate rather than being spent on things. By something less than a complete coincidence, the entire GDP of the United States in 2018 was slightly under 22 trillion dollars. Suppose that instead of holding the US debt in debt instruments, those bond holders sold the bonds and bought stuff with them all. You would suddenly have twice as many dollars chasing the same amount of GDP. Prices wouldn’t just “double;” they’d go through the roof. This is the way all fiat currencies have perished, and it is the way ours will, too.

Stephanie Kelton, in The Deficit Myth, repeatedly states that inflation is the “real speed limit” of an economy. She believes that inflation is price inflation of consumer goods and overlooks the fact that the wealthy, who are the main beneficiaries of monetary inflation are bidding up the prices of the things they buy, stocks and collectibles and so forth. And she is oblivious to the fact that the national debt itself consists of dollars that are being artificially withheld from the market that, unleashed, would swamp it and inflate everything.

So why hasn’t it happened? The actual value of every dollar in existence is worth less than half of what it’s currently going for, so why do people keep them? And that’s where it gets more complicated. It’s complicated by national strategies, military power, and existing agreements, to name just a few reasons, and here it may be useful to step back and look at a simpler model.

An Illustration

Suppose your economy consisted entirely of a one-acre farm and a printing press. If you want to buy farm equipment, you are going to have to issue some IOUs, and the people with equipment to sell will look pretty carefully at your productive capacity before trading you goods for IOUs. They’ll also want to know how many IOUs are already out there in the world, since the more there are, the less likely it is that any will get paid back. And they will want to know something about your character and how serious you are about paying your debts. If your IOUs are denominated as bushels of wheat, you are using a “commodity-based” exchange or currency, and it’s obvious how that system will force you to make careful choices on how you spend your money: too many IOUs and people will stop trading with you.

Now suppose you get frustrated with that “limitation” and, instead of IOUs, use your printing press to print “dollars.” At first, they function exactly the same way the IOUs did. It’s true that since you can print as many dollars as you want you will always be able to pay your dollar debts, but the willingness of people to accept dollars becomes the issue. As long as the dollars bear a close relationship to the production of your farm, people may be willing to accept your dollars.

Now suppose you manage to buy a tank – you’re the first one in your neighborhood with one! Do you suppose that conducting negotiations from the turret of your tank will affect people’s willingness to accept your dollars in trade? Of course it will, but your trade has now taken on elements of extortion.

Let’s go one further step. It’s a few years later, and your one-acre farm has mysteriously grown to ten acres. You have a few more tanks, and fewer neighbors (by coincidence!). There are a lot of your dollars out there, and you persuade other people, because of your “stability,” to start using your dollars as the way they store any surplus savings. In other words, your dollars are a “reserve currency” and you have now attained the status of “sovereign currency issuer.” Now people start trading you stuff in exchange for “accounting entries” because they need dollars.

The people needing dollars will be forced to charge less for their goods than you would, so they will undercut your industry. Your farm workers will get less and less in wages, but your industry will dry up anyway because the neighbors will go to any lengths to get the dollars they must have to pay their bills. Workers everywhere will be paid less and less, inevitably.

As the neighbors collect dollars, they “buy” into your system, and each has a motivation to maintain it since they’d lose their savings if someone saw the emperor had no clothes. And of course there are the treaties they signed, and you still have the tanks and maybe a few aircraft too. As long as you’re top dog, things may stay the same, but you have moved a long, long way from the free exchange that started things, and all your neighbors have good reason to resent you.

This is the United States, obviously. If people found a reason or the courage to start trading dollars for your stuff, you would soon be out of stuff, and your dollars exposed as useless. How long will this system last? As long as your military can make it last.

Real Economics

To show why wild monetary expansion always fails requires enhancing our model a little bit. Consider your community has grown to 100 people. They are not self-sufficient, of course – nothing about the development of this community suggests they would be – but they are rich. Collectively. You’ve made one a banker in charge of the printing press, and he’s the richest, but his nine closest friends, who make weapons, control politics, and operate the biggest businesses, are doing pretty well, too. Everybody else is doing much less well, although ALL of them are doing better than the poor saps on the other farms who are giving you stuff in exchange for accounting entries.

Every time the banker uses his printing press he shifts money to the richest people and takes it from the poorest because every dollar dilutes every person’s percentage holding of the whole, while the dollars go to the banker and his friends.

Within the community, everyone is always scrambling to get dollars. Is it to pay taxes or “provision the government,” as the MMTers suggest? Of course not. They want to eat. They need dollars to buy food.

Consider our banker. His job is to create new dollars and distribute them, which he can certainly do at a profit. But note that every dollar he prints is coming directly out of somebody (everybody) else’s capital: his function is to withdraw part of everyone else’s capital and turn it into spending money (currency). The banker’s job is converting capital to expenditure, and eventually this in itself would cripple an economy.

Now consider an individual business in this system. It started out by trying to offer honest services to various people in exchange for honest prices. Ha! What a rookie, right? But our business person is no dummy. He soon realizes it’s better to provide services to the rich, who can afford them, than to the poor, who cannot. This is a distortion of the market, as is the large weapons facility and the guy who sets up the government business feeding the poor (and buys what’s cheap rather than what people want). All these things represent an economy veering away from productivity.

Our businessman decides he can do better than merely service the rich. He discovers he can incorporate. Because he is a friend of the banker, he can borrow money at a 1% interest rate. His business model is simple. He makes widgets and loses money, but he borrows money to cover the loss and give him enough to hand his shareholders a 5% dividend on their capital. If he borrows $100, he’ll have to add $1 to his annual expenses, but he will show a large profit (with some elementary bookkeeping) for the enterprise because of the borrowed money. What he is really doing is converting the borrowed money to dividends (transferring capital to expenditures), and this is what many businesses in the U.S. are doing right now.

Note that at every level, dollars are constantly being infused into the system as it is inflated. If our model economy either tried to withdraw dollars from the economy or increased the interest rate at which they were borrowed, it would have a large, apparently negative impact on the economy. Our model business might have to shut down, and every business paying wages would find dollars scarcer. This is “deflation,” and economists like the MMT crowd believe deflation is the problem. Of course it is clear to any serious observer that deflation is baked into the system by the inflation that preceded it. Attempting to avoid deflation by adopting MMT and goosing the economy with more inflation every time it tries to correct will increase the misallocation of resources that is the true economic evil in this economy. And it will vastly increase the number of dollars created that will eventually multiply the inflation rate when the dollars are exposed as worthless.

As long as the dollars keep flowing from the printing press and continue to be valued, the sham can continue, but as long as it does, real production is turning increasingly to wasteful and useless things. Real capital is being drained from the economy, and a crash is inevitable. It comes when the economy is unable to continue to maintain the military it has used to extort tribute from its neighbors or the people become so unhappy with their poverty that they refuse to support it anymore.

There is a law in economics as elsewhere, that what must happen eventually will happen. This is the path of the United States at the moment. MMT will make things much worse. In our next essay we look at the origins and unlikely sire of MMT and ask (and answer) the question: why is something that man (of all men!) did now a cornerstone of liberal economics?

The Myth of the “Sovereign Currency” in MMT

Stephanie Kelton, in The Deficit Myth, points out that the United States is on a fiat currency system and “prints” the currency it uses to pay its bills. The US, she says, has a “sovereign currency” and can never run out of money to pay its bills; it can spend whatever it wants. It is true that the US retains monopoly control over the US money supply, but the way it currently uses this power, and the ways Kelton proposes expanding it, should trouble every progressive. Our “sovereign currency” is rooted in Western Imperialism and is, even now, in place because of military conquest and coercion. As used in The Deficit Myth it is racist and imperialist. In this article we show it is morally wrong, In our next article we show why it is mortally vulnerable.

Sovereign Currency

Few words have caused more mischief than the word “sovereign.” What is sovereignty, pragmatically? How does it arise? And what does it do?

My dictionary defines “sovereign” as “supreme in power, unlimited by any other, possessing or entitled to original or independent authority.” That high-flown definition may explain why the word has caused so much mischief. As Mao said, political power comes from the barrel of a gun, but another common expression is simply: “might makes right.” In the final analysis, that is what sovereignty relies upon. It is the result of a group of people claiming independence of all others and the right to make laws in their interests. It is not a philosophical principle, in other words, but an arrogation of power. Progressives are well-aware of the harm done by legal immunities, and a brief search of Youtube will reveal thousands of benighted souls claiming “sovereignty” to do this or that. They are inevitably crushed by the systems they oppose. But what about a “sovereign currency? How does that fit in to the mischief?

As Kelton (briefly!) points out, for a nation to have a sovereign currency they must

do more than just grant themselves the exclusive right to issue the currency. It’s also important that they don’t promise to convert their currency into something they could run out of (e.g., gold or some other country’s currency). And they need to refrain from borrowing (i.e., taking on debt) in a currency that isn’t their own. When a country issues its own nonconvertible (fiat) currency and only borrows in its own currency, that country has attained monetary sovereignty.

Of course, one could have a sovereign currency without overspending, but what’s the fun of that? The whole point of being able to pay all your bills with money you print is NOT to pay them at all. Otherwise, you have to make all the unpleasant decisions that people living on a budget do (lowly currency users rather than supreme issuers). No, the purpose of MMT is to empower the government to spend more money than it has.[1]

One way to overspend is to buy more things from other countries than they buy from you: a trade imbalance. The MMT crowd does recognize that the trade policies causing trade imbalances result in lost jobs, but like Liz Warren, they “have a plan for that!” We discuss that plan, the federal jobs program, elsewhere.  Meanwhile, Kelton voices a version of the “White Man’s Burden:” “We’re not really borrowing from China so much as we’re supplying China with dollars and then allowing those dollars to be transformed into a US Treasure security.”

She goes on:

You could argue that this is actually a bad deal for China (and other countries that run trade surpluses against the United States). After all, it means their workers are using their time and energy to produce real goods and services that China doesn’t hold on to for its own people. By running trade surpluses, China is essentially allowing the US to take its stuff in exchange for an accounting entry…”

You certainly COULD argue that this arrangement is a bad deal for China, and if you believe the Chinese are not aware that it is, you haven’t been paying attention to them. China and Russia have both been working quite hard to eliminate the trade and currency laws that make American dollars the world reserve currency, as this is what allows us to trade accounting entries for real stuff. As they know, and as any progressive who was being honest would also know, any arrangement that allows a dominant military superpower to trade accounting entries for real things is also known as imperialism, exploitation, and colonialism.

And so, if you’re in the mood to look at things honestly, ask yourself these things: is it any coincidence that the countries providing America with the bulk of its stuff in exchange for accounting entries are southern, post-colonial or presently colonized nations? Are they just really stupid? Or do you think that the United States military bases scattered throughout the world and a military costing about a trillion dollars per year might have something to do with it? Is it possible that our “sovereign currency” actually depends on being a military bully throughout the world?

Many suggest that the real reasons for the wars against Iran and Iraq are their independence on the monetary front: Iran and Iraq have both worked to create a different kind of oil transaction – one that would not depend on US dollars. Some believe the elimination of petrodollars would force the US to pay for the resources it is currently extracting from third world countries by attacking our ability to borrow only in currency we control. Why should we be able to do that when, for example, South Africa is not? Are we using our military to prevent a shift away from international debts being predominantly in dollars? It looks like it. Undoubtedly we use our military to bully the rest of the world and extract resources – would bloated military budgets be required as well as enabled, by MMT?

We’ll talk about what happens if some of those dollars, currently accounting entries, start coming home in our next article, but for now we merely point out that Kelton does have some idea of what might happen (though she hides it), and she is interested in preventing it from happening.

Here’s what she says about that:

Foreign investors should be limited in the ways they can invest in domestic assets and in their ability to sell out and create downward pressure on the exchange rate market…. In other words, regulating international capital flows shouldn’t be looked at as a short term “stopgap” measure but a permanent policy to help nations reach higher and higher degrees of monetary sovereignty.

Right now we are buying approximately 400 billion dollars more of stuff per year from China than they are from us. In exchange, they are accepting currency which is “legal tender for any and all debts” in the US (and useful elsewhere). The country does impose some limits (for strategic reasons) on the assets it permits China to buy with all those dollars, but it has not used that power to a great degree, and China has been circumspect about buying real (as opposed to fiscal) assets as well. Imposing increased capital flow restrictions would necessarily reduce the value of our dollars elsewhere.

It might be wise to regard the attractiveness of dollars as a sort of balance beam: to the extent we can force other countries to accept them, they can be less attractive, and the less attractive they are, the more we must resort to military intimidation. MMT is a powerful force for making our dollars less attractive. Adopting MMT is therefore a commitment to a massive military.

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[1] We address in the fourth essay of this series, Kelton’s distinction between fiscal and resource budgets. In many ways this is the most fundamental problem of all with MMT.  We note here (albeit with scorn) her claimed distinction and her related argument that ignoring fiscal budgeting permits a more effective form of resource allocation.

A Leftwing Critique of Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth

If you believe in any limitations of federal governmental power, you should reject Stephanie Kelton’s vision of it as espoused in The Deficit Myth. The approach she advocates would either destroy our country completely or turn it, finally, into absolute totalitarianism. I discuss why in this series of articles.

A Brief Literary Critique of The Deficit Myth

Anyone who has studied direct mail advertising will recognize the techniques used throughout The Deficit Myth. Indeed, much of the book is nothing more than an infomercial. Serious presentations of ideas spend little time personalizing the writer’s process of learning them because the reader is expected to see the power of the ideas presented and understand them. In The Deficit Myth, however, Kelton goes to great length – and exaggerates vastly – her process of “discovering” the concepts of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Throughout the book she refers repeatedly to her personal trials and triumphs in government in which she spoke always to (men) of good intentions who either just couldn’t understand what she was saying or didn’t have the courage to advocate it, or who were her gurus. Nowhere does she discuss the importance of limiting government or controlling federal spending or present any principled objections to her proposals.

Consider, for example, Kelton’s summary of her early experience with MMT: “I went in search of answers, spent months researching intricacies… pored over documents, read countless books and articles, and talked with numerous government insiders. Then I began writing.[1]” Since Kelton is describing her Ph.D. studies, what she describes is hardly unusual, though it is grossly inflated. She read some books and articles and talked to a few people – this is what every Ph.D. student does. Whether she spoke to “government insiders” or not is irrelevant to the ideas, but it does contribute to the mood of her book. It is a common direct marketing technique.

Or consider this passage:

“The government doesn’t want dollars,” Mosler explained. “It wants something else.”

“What does it want?” I asked.

“It wants to provision itself,” he replied. “The tax isn’t there to raise money. It’s there to get people working and producing things for the government.”

“What kind of things?” I asked.

“A military, a court system, public parks, hospitals, roads, bridges. That kind of stuff.”

To get the population to do all that work, the government imposes taxes, fees, fines or other obligations. The tax is there to create a demand for the government’s currency. Before anyone can pay the tax, someone has to do the work to earn the currency.

My head spun. Then he told me a story…

You will never see this sort of emotionalization of an intellectual topic in a serious book, but it is common in direct mail. It’s a sales technique designed to overcome objections – “I used to think… but then I learned…”

What is MMT Selling?

So what is MMT selling? It is selling another thing common to infomercials, the idea that, despite all your life experiences telling you there is “no free lunch,” MMT can give you endless free lunches. You need never pay for lunch again.[2]

And how do we get all these free lunches? If you’ve read any of a million self-help books out there, you know the answer to this one, too: you “make a decision.” That’s all. Change your way of thinking about money, and the free lunches flow endlessly.

The “insight,” repeated perhaps 500 times throughout the book, is that the United States claims a monopolistic right to coin or print money. Since it can print as much as it likes, whenever it likes, it can never run out of money. We have… a “sovereign currency.” What that means in reality, where it comes from, and where it leads will be addressed at great length in my next article, but from the point of view of critiquing The Deficit Myth I merely point out that this is the insight of the book. As a concept it could have been explained in a paragraph or two. As a sales piece it obviously requires much, much more.

The Lure of MMT

What makes The Deficit Myth so beguiling to left-wingers is that most of it is spent addressing very real issues that trouble us all. Kelton spends many chapters discussing the “real deficits” of democracy, infrastructure, wage inequality and poverty, and so on. She suggests that MMT is the way to address these problems. She does admit, briefly, that Congress, which has brought us all these problems, would still have to change its priorities to use MMT to our advantage, but this is a mere transition to more political talk about how important that is and how wonderful it would be.

Kelton does propose one specific program in detail, apparently the darling of the MMT crowd: the federal jobs guarantee. Briefly, this is a program whereby the Federal Government would offer jobs to every individual wishing to work at a “livable wage” with acceptable benefits. We will discuss this proposal in great detail in a subsequent article. Our view of the program, as attractive as it sounds, is that it would be a disaster, but that it would be so is so apparent to any conservative lawmaker that it would never become law. Still, fairness requires mentioning it as a specific, substantive part of Kelton’s book.

In the final analysis, Kelton[3] takes one insight, dresses it up and parades it endlessly through the pages of her book along with a liberal litany of issues that would concern her readers. As a sales piece it appears to be effective: the book has sold well and created a cult of believers. On an intellectual basis it’s pretty thin fare. But then, The Deficit Myth is not about economics, and it isn’t intellectual. MMT is designed to give legitimacy to a gigantic expansion of government power under a liberal guise. We discuss that, and why it should trouble left-wingers so much, in the next article.

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[1] I take two liberties here, and throughout my exposition, with citations to The Deficit Myth. The first is that I do not include page references. I will correct that eventually after I get the printed version of the book. I’m writing this based on the Kindle version, which has location numbers but not page numbers. The second liberty is to dispense with the use of “sic” to indicate some sort of textual error in the original. Kelton used the word “poured” instead of “pored” here, for example, and there are similar typos elsewhere. I simply correct them without comment. My critique is of ideas, not typography.

[2] I note that in two or three places The Deficit Myth explicitly denies that she is offering a free lunch or a “panacea” (she uses those terms), but these are naked assertions with no discussion of the limitations of MMT. As we will discuss later, Kelton does believe that “inflation” is a potential limitation of MMT, but as she explains, in a system as chronically under-performing as ours is, this need not be of any immediate concern.

[3] I call Stephanie Kelton “Kelton” throughout this and the following articles. I do so not out of disrespect, however. She is, presumably, a Ph.D. and could call herself “Doctor” Kelton, but I think this appears nowhere in her book, so I will respect that choice. She is also a professor and could call herself that, but again, she does not. Calling her “Ms.” would seem to suggest a refusal to recognize her honorifics, but this is not my intention.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a Fraud

I wonder if, now that some on the left are beginning to recognize AOC as just another player of the game, they will ALSO recognize that her pet monetary theory, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), is another game rule that will keep the working class under the heels of the 1%. Is that too much to ask? MMT is a fraud.

For most of the past fifty years, “bad news” in the world has been “good news” in the stock market. The so-called pundits like to say that stock markets “look forward,” so if bad news happens today, good news must be coming soon. Some may believe that, but as anyone with real market experience knows, stock traders do not trade on that platitude. Instead, they realize a trend in motion tends to continue until something stops it: traders actually think that if bad news happens, more bad news is on the way, in other words.

So why do stock markets go up when bad things happen in the world? Money. For the past fifty years, every time something bad happens in the world, the Federal Reserve has stepped in to loosen the money supply.

The proponents of MMT like to talk of monetary “sovereigns.” The arrogance and oppression that goes into this concept are worthy of discussion, but we’ll discuss that elsewhere. For the present, let us accept the concept that countries such as the U.S. and its military allies are monetarily sovereigns. That means, in this case, that they are able to borrow money in currency they control. They can never run out of money! Whee! Third world countries have to make stuff and live within their means, but monetary sovereigns get everything for free. Somehow this dynamic does not create uneasiness in the left-wing political community.

There is one theoretical limitation to MMT’s magic, however: “inflation.” According to MMT, taxation and other monetary controls do not exist to rein in expenses, they are, instead, a way of controlling how much money people have left over to buy things. If the government spends a bunch on steel, for example, and the people still have enough money, they will ALSO try to buy steel, and this will drive up the price of steel. This is the simple-minded view of inflation that passes for thought in MMT, and it applies to every resource. If the government leaves too much money in the hands of the people and also buys things, it will create resource shortages that show up as inflation. Right now, the MMT proponents argue, governments “can’t even” generate the 2% inflation they think would be a good thing, so there are obviously no limits in sight to what MMT would allow.

There are many problems with this theory, not least of which is the effect of debt on inflation, but let us pass over these questions and examine this concept of “inflation.” The MMT theorists ignore the fact that ever since the US became a “monetary sovereign” (by defaulting on its obligations under the Bretton Woods Agreements and abandoning the dollar’s connection to gold), wages of working people have stagnated.  The wealthy have gained tremendously, but wages have barely kept up with the official rate of inflation. This is not a coincidence, though the MMTers act like it is, but for the present let us pretend, as the MMTers do, that it “just happened.”

What else has “just happened” over the past fifty years? Well, there’s that matter of third-world countries having to give us stuff in exchange for the dollars. Astonishingly, the MMTers adopt a line straight from the “White Man’s Burden” playbook when they claim we are doing the darker-skinned people of the world a favor by giving them dollars in exchange for their production. Passing over this obvious exploitation, as the MMTers do, let us just consider the effects of all those “free” goods coming into the country. Wouldn’t they suppress prices for those goods? Of course they would. And what about the rampant exportation of industry that has contributed to falling wages: wouldn’t that, too, tend to suppress the cost of consumer goods? Of course it would. Poor people in America, whose wages have stagnated for fifty years, cannot afford to pay higher prices, and so consumer goods have not inflated at the rates they might have, although the government has also adopted various measures to mask even the consumer inflation.

Does this mean there is no inflation? It certainly does not. Poor people cannot pay more for the goods they’re buying because they are not the ones who are accumulating all the excess dollars that are being created. Who is accumulating those dollars? The 1%. Is anything they are buying going up in price? Well, yes. Stock prices are going up.

There’s a meme going around that says the fifty richest people in America have seen their wealth increase by about a trillion dollars this year, the year of the corona virus. Do you imagine that the companies have increased their earnings during this time? Have they become more efficient? More profitable? Perhaps Amazon has, but most of the others have not. So what has happened? Two things. First, the Federal Reserve has poured trillions into the stock markets owned by the wealthy, directly subsidizing the prices of individual stocks and their wealthy owners. Second, all the inflation from excessive government spending has ALSO inflated the dollar holdings of the wealthy, and they are bidding up the prices of stocks. This is the inflation that MMT overlooks, and it’s why “bad news” is “good news” in the markets.

MMT, with all its talk of (essentially) unlimited ability to buy things, promises to supercharge the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. It glosses over this game-changing rule change by some high talk about unjust wars, lack of social programs, and a need for various investments such as the Green New Deal. That’s just liberal talk, akin to the way they “burned everything down” to prevent the confirmation of a new Supreme Court Justice (who was then confirmed in record time, over no opposition at all). There may be a little more money for bread and circuses, but the net effect of MMT would be an increase in the rate of wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

That’s what it’s for.

More on Attacking Neo-Nazis

I honestly thought that when I criticized someone for Sunday-punching (sneak attacking) a neo-Nazi that someone from “left-twitter” would eventually join my position, and that people would begin to see things more honestly. I have been disappointed. The responses have been almost uniformly foolish and worse.

The Facts

To review the facts, which are quite simple. A young man – probably late teens or early twenties – was standing with his arm in the “Heil Hitler” salute. His eyes were either closed or nearly so, and he was not speaking. There was a crowd, but it wasn’t clear to me who was in it – apparently not a lot of other neo-Nazis, however. The young was not moving or talking, and someone came up and punched him, apparently knocking him unconscious. Where I come from, that’s called a cheap shot regardless of the political views expressed.

Comments on the Facts

Left-wing Twitter (the comments I saw, anyway) was in ecstasy over this brutal attack because the victim was a Nazi. My comment pointing out it was a cheap shot has resulted in a variety of insults, primarily along the lines of “Nazi-supporter or apologist,” “privileged white woman,” and various accusations regarding my intelligence or seriousness.

I initially addressed the situation as a question of freedom of expression and pragmatism: attacking neo-Nazis – not as a matter of self-defense but solely because their ideas are abhorrent is obviously a complete abandonment of the principle of freedom of expression. It also makes things more dangerous for peaceful demonstrators from the left, both when it’s done and later.

I also pointed out that attacking a peaceful protestor is illegal and counterproductive. If the police do their job, they will track down and jail the person who attacked the neo-Nazi. Thus the 1% profits in several ways: the punk who threw the punch will make license plates for some corporation at slave wages; the neo-Nazis will probably have been moved to the right by the obvious crime which occurred, which they will associate with the left; and the schism between members of the working class will have been increased. Instead of uniting against the real oppressors in our country, members of the oppressed will be hurting each other.

How smart was it to bring all that about? Is that really something to celebrate?

The response to my points has been endless macho posturing: how Nazis tried to conquer the world, the “paradox of tolerance,” or just the naked assertion of a right to attack people with bad ideas. There has been not one trace of irony in any of it – it seems never to have occurred to all these “freedom fighters” of the left that they are usually the victims of this sort of redneck brutality. Not one commenter has observed how quickly I was labeled a “Nazi sympathizer” (and thus made eligible for random acts of violence).

A Matter of Courage and Cowardice

I repeat: the guy who got punched was not looking at his attacker and expected nothing – he was expressing a viewpoint. Peacefully. How much courage did it take that hero to punch a guy who had his eyes closed? Not one tenth the courage it takes to march in a BLM protest, I’d venture to say, and yet his cheap shot made marching in BLM protests more dangerous. You’d think some leftists would observe that and criticize it. But the bottom line is that most of the macho commentators are probably not doing anything in real life. Talk is so cheap when that’s all you do.

Degrees of Evil

One responder found it “horrifying” that I could say that there are “degrees of evil” in relation to Nazism. Well, some people find any amount of thinking horrifying, right? But that there are degrees of evil is a pretty conventional thought. The Nuremburg Trials found that there were degrees of evil in the Third Reich, for example, and indeed every legal system is based on the concept. But let’s consider the idea in regard to Nazis and neo-Nazis.

It’s easy to call German Nazis of the twentieth century evil – although of course there were degrees. Some were willing and knowing, others more negligent or ignorant, and to some extent the whole German people tolerated and funded Nazi atrocities and were responsible for them. But it all came about because of an industrial state, a large military, a comprehensive political machine, and far-reaching strategy as well as a tradition of militarism. Nazis were evil, and they were powerful enough to perpetrate evil on a gigantic scale.

How does a neo-Nazi in America stack up to all that? No industrial state, no military, no political machine, no real strategy, and little in the way of genuine militarism. They are not generally respected or encouraged. Neo-Nazis in America are lost people who have adopted an ideology of hate. Nazis in tanks or threatening the world needed to be stopped. Neo-Nazis in American need to be helped. Of course they may not want to be helped, and if they try to commit acts of violence they must be stopped. Nazi ideals should obviously be derided and opposed, but people are not their ideas – people have ideas which they take more or less seriously. Every parent has watched his or her children try out ideas and understands that the ideas are not their children. Neo-Nazis are not “Nazism.” Nazism may be evil – is evil in my opinion – but people with Nazi ideas are more complicated.

The paradox of tolerance

There’s a meme going around expressing the idea that tolerating intolerance is paradoxical. You can do too much “tolerating” and the person tolerated can end up killing you. This is a stupid word game and a poor substitute for real thinking. A tolerant attitude towards ideas is not, by any means, the same as a permissive attitude towards actions. The first amendment makes this clear: expression is permitted (broadly speaking), but actions are regulated by law. Tolerating a neo-Nazi’s Heil Hitler salute, or a ball player’s kneeling during the national anthem, or a hippy’s wearing the U.S. flag on his jeans is one thing – that is required of the government by the constitution. Allowing destructive actions is quite another. There is no paradox of tolerance.

Attacking neo-Nazis for peacefully expressing themselves provides a certain juvenile pleasure for some, but it is stupid, vicious, and profoundly counterproductive. The left should not condone such thuggery.

Freedom of Expression, the Left Wing, and Red Herrings

Many years ago the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) chose to represent a Nazi group. I forget the details, but I think it involved the right to march in a parade somewhere. Thus I found myself financially supporting one group that was suing and pursuing the KKK and another group defending the rights of Nazis, and I discontinued my support of the ACLU.

Live and learn, right?

Now, long after cutting off the ACLU, I find myself criticizing a physical attack on a peaceful Nazi demonstrator. Within a few hours of taking this audacious stand I had been criticized as a “Nazi-sympathizer,” dismissed as a “privileged white woman,” and beset by the most intellectually dishonest arguments imaginable – all in support of some punk who Sunday-punched a man holding his arm in the infamous “Heil Hitler” salute. You never saw such self-righteous celebration of an unprovoked attack on a peaceful protestor – unless you’ve been paying attention to the way right-wingers celebrate the police brutality raining down on protests in Oregon or Minneapolis.  If you have been paying attention to the right wingers, you probably noticed the same eerie similarities I did. And the defenses of the attacks are almost exactly the same as well.

Ironically, at almost the same time of the Sunday-punching of the neo-Nazi, there was another attack that brought some of the same, but also different, responses. This was the shooting of an apparently right-wing bully who was pushing around a security guard for the press at a protest. I discuss that event in my article “Rethinking the Tactics of Self-Defense and Nonviolence in Street Actions for BLM,” but it is probably familiar to everyone now. My article and tweets about it received a much more thoughtful response – very little sympathy for the right-winger, of course, but at least an understanding that violence might not be the best tactical move by the left wing, currently a small percentage of the population. There was considerable resonance to my observation that when protestors fight the fringe-right, the conflict involves two factions of the 99% and benefits the 1%, who are left free to attend to their daily business of extracting wealth from all of us.

Irony

It is ironic that the same people who argue so strenuously against the dehumanization and murder of Black Lives Matter protestors by the police and rampaging right wingers, also claim the right to do the same thing against neo-Nazis. In both cases you have the same brutality, the same self-righteous, unquestioning assertion of a right to murder those who disagree with you.[1] And the violence against non-whites in general is first-cousin to this attitude, since it is simply the assertion of a right to murder those who look different or have different culture whatever they may be expressing.

Those defending the attack did a lot of talking about Hitler and World War II and were performatively outraged by my comparison of the Heil Hitler salute to Colin Kaepernick’s taking of a knee during the national anthem. How dare I compare a gesture calling up the Nazi war machine to Kaepernick’s noble statement regarding American atrocities? I dare because both were peacefully expressing ideas that others opposed. I admire Kaepernick and abhor the Nazis because I have had a chance to weigh their ideas and compare them. Kaepernick’s vision of an ethical America and justice for non-whites is a more hopeful and attractive vision – and more honest, too. Given time, I would expect the vast majority of Americans to see things the same way I do on that score. Kaepernick’s view will win in the marketplace of ideas, and that’s where it should win. Stifling the debate and snuffing out dissent is more likely to perpetuate Nazi thinking than eliminate it. That’s the whole idea behind freedom of expression and the first amendment. Addressing the economic causes that provide a breeding ground for Nazi ideas is obviously important too.

Another irony that would be clear to anyone taking an honest view of the matter is that for BLM protests to survive and have an impact they must be free to occur without general murder and mayhem. The BLM protests depend upon freedom of expression, at least at this point. Of course they are not entirely free of murder and mayhem by any means at this point, and the left is vocal in its protests of this lawlessness, as it should be. In the incident with the security guard, one of the points raised was that it might be beneficial if right wingers feared more physical consequences for their acts of violence against the protestors. Although I ultimately came down on the other side of the question, it had its appeal, but imagine the outrage the left would have expressed if another Nazi had seen the attack on his friend, pulled out a gun, and shot the person who hurt his friend. When we reach the point where every protest is accompanied by murder, we are at the point of full-scale oppression or revolution – it is a naked power struggle and nothing more. As a tactical matter, at the minimum, the left should not adopt this approach given the overwhelming material advantages on the other side.

But who is the other side?

Red Herrings

It is dismaying to see the blood lust expressed over the unprovoked attack of a Nazi protestor. I was denounced as a “privileged white woman” for suggesting that the individual protestor might evolve and change his mind. I was a “Nazi sympathizer” because I refused to congratulate the guy who punched and knocked out someone who wasn’t even looking at him. The attack was justified, they said, because the Nazi’s ideas were “violent” – as if the guy punching him was actually defending himself. Anyone paying attention to Kaepernick’s situation will have heard all the same arguments.

But the attack was stupid, and defending it is stupid. It isn’t just immoral, it is counterproductive for the same reason the shooting was: it is members of the 99% hurting each other while the 1% conducts business as usual. Neo-Nazis are a small percentage of the population, and even with Trump’s apparent support and encouragement they are outwardly scorned by most Americans. More to the point, however, even the briefest glimpse of most of them reveals they are not members of the 1%, though they may certainly be their tools.

When leftists attack Neo-Nazis, they too are functioning as tools of the 1%. They are creating and perpetuating a divide between members of the 99% that helps guarantee the continued prosperity of the elite. Instead of seeking to bridge the gap and create understanding, those attacking the Neo-Nazis are ensuring the continued existence of that divide – they’re working for the 1%.

It is wrong and dishonest to argue that attacking a neo-Nazi protestor in American is in any way equivalent to defending the world from Nazi invasion. The guy holding up his arm in the Heil Hitler salute is making a statement – engaging in first amendment protected rights the same as the BLM protestors are doing. He isn’t pointing a gun, capturing France, or rounding up victims of the Holocaust. Frankly, he may not even know about those things. To argue that attacking this one protestor is akin to refighting World War II should be too absurd to require response, yet the assertion has been made repeatedly to me by people from the left.

So should we invite neo-Nazis to brunch? Maybe a Kaffeeklatch or a debate at the local church? I can hear it now, “Elena, you’re sympathizing with, giving voice to, people who stand for the worst that humans can be, you’re asserting some weird white privilege, safe from the violence of these monsters,” etc. Well, people can change, and I’m not sure that talking to the neo-Nazis is all that bad an idea. Recognizing them as human beings is just recognizing the truth. But engaging in the ideological battle at the ideological level is not really about converting those who are already Nazis; it’s about preventing its spread to those who are not Nazis. Colin Kaepernick, when he kneels, is probably not trying to change Donald Trump’s mind, he’s bringing his view to the attention of largely apolitical football fans. That is where the battle is to be won. You could talk to the Nazis, and it might eventually bring fruit every so often, but if a community is creating a lot of neo-Nazis, it’s probably a better idea to improve jobs, housing and education – all things the 1% could do if they wanted to. Reduce the hostility and you reduce the need to express hostility.

We on the left would do better to focus on the ways the 1% create and profit from hardship and injustice everywhere than on fighting their battles for them in the streets.

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[1] I note that the situation I’m discussing involved a punch and not a bullet. Punches can often be lethal. This one apparently knocked the victim unconscious (someone described, with joy, him falling into a pile). By itself the punch could have killed or brain-damaged the victim, and falling while unconscious is also often damaging. Be that as it may, many people defending the attack have asserted the right to more lethal means, and there is no principled distinction between the forms of violence condoned by those defending the attack. I do not assert that the person attacking the Nazi “wanted” to kill him, but it is a principle of the law that an actor is responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of his actions, and if the Nazi dies, one can expect intentional homicide charges to follow.

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Rethinking the Tactics of Self-defense or Nonviolence in Street Actions in BLM

On October 11, 2020, there was a confrontation between a gun-carrying security guard and a man who was apparently a counter-protestor. The counter-protestor ran up and confronted the security guard who, after some tough talk, pushed him back and drew his gun. The counter-protestor, falling back, attempted to mace the security guard,¹ who shot and killed him.

There has been a lot of high-fiving among leftists on Twitter, to which I responded as follows:

After watching so many black people being murdered by pigs for less of an “attack” than this, I can understand why people are celebrating, but if this is all the evidence I’m not convinced this was valid self-defense. I can’t cry for the dead guy, but he was a dumb redneck, a pawn in the game. This is nothing to celebrate in my opinion. It’s people in the bottom 99% shooting and hurting each other while the 1% will go to the bank tomorrow as usual.

It turns out I CAN cry for the dead guy, and leftist Twitter comments and my own response to the entire situation have caused me to rethink my position on nonviolence as well as my decision to call all police “pigs.”

My take on the dead guy, as a pawn in the game (but minus my insulting reference to rednecks), remains. He probably thought he was doing something right and good in confronting the protestor, or perhaps he was a bully who found an opportunity to throw his weight around. In any event, he was someone’s son, possibly a brother, friend, or even a father. Everyone who loved him – if any – suffered a loss. Generalizing, that is obviously true of all casualties of street violence, and it should not be forgotten.

But what of the protestor who shot him? In all likelihood, his life, too, changed permanently in the instant in which he fired the shot. From what I saw, I wouldn’t confidently characterize it as self-defense. Would a reasonable person have felt in imminent danger of grave bodily injury at the moment he pulled the trigger? Of course it would be enough for the police, but that’s part of what we want to change. It’s a close call, and that likely means the man will be arrested and tried for homicide. That’s a terrible thing for him, and his family, if any, will be feeling the sad repercussions of the moment’s action for many years.

On a more general note, it seems likely that the entire event has made protests even more dangerous than they were. We all know the right wing militias are on a hair-trigger, and judging by what I saw on some of their twitter sites, they are on more of one now. They might not be able to get to the protestor in question (although they might – if he’s arrested he’ll be uniquely vulnerable), but the right wingers are not always big on fine distinctions anyway. They may massacre any number of people to “send a message.” And they will surely be better armed and more likely to use their weapons in tense situations.

I don’t want to be killed; most other people don’t either. Before this shooting, there was far too great a risk of injury or death from protesting. That risk has gone up, I think, and that means fewer people will protest. I am simply enumerating what appear to be natural consequences of this shooting, whatever the justification any of the individuals involved had.

Now consider politics in America. Whatever the schisms, I think it’s not controversial to posit, as I do now, that the conflict going on now is between the “few” and the “many.” I generally think of it as a conflict between the 1% and the 99%, but it would be foolish to overlook or minimize the racial divide. In any event, our goal is to mobilize the vast body of Americans who are not currently on the firing lines and move them towards supporting and calling for some change.

Everybody has prejudices, but to move the body politic we need, I think, to create connections between all of our natural allies. That is, we need to speak to everybody in the 99% – to reduce the hostility of the far right if possible and to build alliances with everybody else. To the extent that protests become dangerous, they marginalize the people protesting and create divisions within the 99%. That inevitably helps the 1%.

I have pointed out before that the far right has been violent and murderous and have actively “wondered” what would happen if they had to fear lethal consequences for that violence. Now that it has happened, I don’t like what I see. Future events may prove me wrong, but I don’t think the marches just got safer, and I do think they just got less effective, by the violence that occurred.

I am not less cognizant of the lives of the protestors or of black victims of police violence, and indeed these remain my main concern. To me they appear less safe now than before.

Non-violence is not wimpy. It requires standing up to injustice, danger, brutality, and a state that has simply adopted fascist violence and politics as its policy. But to reach across the barriers, to exert moral pressure and awaken compassion not in the 1%, who are our avowed enemies, but in the unawakened portions of the 99%, I believe we must abhor and avoid violence. Our strategy simply must include reaching out to people currently following Trump as well as those following the Democrats, and draw them into a larger coalition. Killing them, even in self-defense, seems unlikely to do that.

On the other hand, strategic non-violence must go beyond standing around with signs. It must make the status quo – the racism and economic injustice that is occurring, unprofitable and uncomfortable. Blocking a road, for example, forces people out of their routines and imposes hardships upon them. It forces people to recognize that the lives they are living are constructed for their own comfort but may be oppressive to others – and it certainly causes hard feelings in many of the people affected – regrettable, but probably acceptable and necessary in the long run. Burning buildings is a step farther, yet I think there is still a principled distinction between obstructive or destructive opposition and violent resistance. I think that the chance of moving the unawakened part of the 99% is improved by staying nonviolent, and hurt by engaging in violence, even without the obvious fact that both the right wing and the police state are far better equipped and more ready to inflict violence.

I articulated my reasons for calling the police “pigs” in my article Why I Call the Police Pigs, and I haven’t changed my feelings that police like to think of themselves as heroes or minor deities and that calling them “pigs” would attack that delusion to some extent. I haven’t changed my opinion of what the police are or have done, or that many of the people they hire are sociopaths who are trained into full-scale psychopathy. However I am reminded that I want to build coalition with the great body of Americans who do not see the police as I do. Whether the police would, in any event, be moved either by widespread scorn or general respect I really do not know, but I’m pretty sure that calling them “pigs” drives a wedge between me and some of the people I want to reach. So I will stop doing it.

The first casualty in any war is always the truth, and those who dare to speak it or engage in serious attempts to find and elucidate it are probably the second casualties. I expect my comments here and elsewhere to arouse hostility on both the right and left ends of the spectrum as they have already done. Nevertheless I think my duty is to the effectiveness of the movement, and that means to speak truth where possible and to try more consistently to keep my eyes on the overall goals behind all of our actions.

At the end of the day, we want a more life-affirming government, more rights and a fairer share in the distribution of resources. We want less violence and more opportunity, fewer constructs like racism, sexism or nationalism to divide us. We want a clearer view of the truth and beauty in life. I do not think violence will get us there.

Fn1. I have not been able to figure out exactly what was going on here, and in particular, whether the security guard – who was hired by a contractor for Pinkerton – was acting as a security guard or in some less formal position. He was apparently there to protect news reporters, but I couldn’t see any in the clip I saw. I don’t think it matters for the points I make, though, because the flavor of the confrontation was clearly protestor vs. counter-protestor. I suppose it could matter in the trial (for first degree murder), but i intend my comments only to apply to the way protests are conducted. The right wing groups I saw certainly regarded the guard as a “protestor.”

Time and Sexism in Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day is one of my favorite movies. I’m a sucker for a love story that works out, and I’ve fantasized about redoing various parts of my life till I got them right so that I’m probably drawn to that central conceit of the movie too. But this isn’t to say that the movie doesn’t have problems. It is plagued by sexism.

Groundhog Day, the Movie

The underlying action in Groundhog Day is relatively simple. Bill Murray plays a weatherman stuck redoing one specific day (Groundhog day) over and over. He doesn’t know why, but it turns out it is so that he gets things right, falls in love and seals the deal with his producer, played by Andie MacDowell. He starts with confusion as it dawns on him that he’s reliving the same day over and over and has no idea why. Then he sees some opportunities for exploitation (including sexual, incidentally), and while in this phase he falls in love with MacDowell. He then begins to use the fact that he gets to replay every day to try to turn himself into MacDowell’s ideal man. This turns to despair when he concludes that he cannot do that. Finally he has a couple of existential crises where he decides to make the best of each day regardless of the fact that it will all be undone the following morning. Ironically, that’s when he finally begins living life as if it means something.[1]

We see Murray living the same day over – presumably thousands of times (judging by the fact he learns how to play the piano quite well and becomes some sort of doctor as well as learns how to speak French and becomes an accomplished ice sculptor. So he lives a long, long, long time with his love for MacDowell. She, on the other hand, relives the same day over and over again unconscious that it is happening.

The central thematic challenge of the movie is to move Andie MacDowell from rightly despising the negative and sexually harassing Bill Murray to loving him all in (for her) one day. Before I discuss how the movie does that, I want to elaborate on my claim of sexism and harassment.

Sexism and Harassment

Andie MacDowell is a new producer for the television station for which Murray is the weatherman. In almost the first scene in which she’s a part, Murray calls the anchorwoman of the station “Hairdo” because she asks him if he’s made a certain trip to Punxsutawney, PA three times (instead of the four he has made). Within ten minutes of real time in the movie, Murray has repeatedly insulted MacDowell and even suggested more than once that she have sex with him to help his morale. This sort of behavior should have gotten him fired, but the best MacDowell manages is to say he’s “incredible” in a sort of sneering helpless way. Since the movie was produced in 1993, these scenes show remarkably bad judgment by the producer, and it is still jarring – even after watching the movie several times – to contemplate that the producer could have found a sexual harasser an appropriate character to be the hero of this movie.

Moreover, these harassing events come before Groundhog Day, so they should be fresh in MacDowell’s memory every single iteration of Phil’s life. She should have started every day despising him and wondering whether he would destroy her career or actually rape her. That all the appropriate negativity could have disappeared so rapidly is a sure sign that all the people designing the movie were male and did not regard the sexism as serious. In our culture in general, sexual harassment was indeed regarded as serious, but as subsequent “Me-too” accounts have revealed, Hollywood was extremely late getting that memo.

The theme of the movie was also, somewhat more subtly, sexist. This boils down to the fact that Andie MacDowell was perfect the first time and every time, while it was up to Murray to make himself perfect for her. This goes far beyond curing himself of sexism (which isn’t addressed) to becoming a generous and caring person, to learning many tricks, like piano playing, to fascinate, amuse and win her. She as Madonna starts out and remains perfect. And that sets up the (sexist) conflict that must have occupied the producer’s thoughts for much of the movie: how do we get this perfect Madonna into bed with Murray without making her look like a whore?

Because what woman, on the second day after she meets a guy, ends up in bed with him at the end of a relatively short evening? Especially after he has spent hours antagonizing and sexually harassing her, and more especially when she has a professional – possibly a supervisory – relationship with him? How does such a woman retain her Madonna-like purity?

Time in Groundhog Day

Making Andie MacDowell fall in love with Bill Murray in one day of her life is the challenge that makes this movie, despite its significant flaws, so interesting to me

Murray, as I’ve pointed out, experiences every day as a new (albeit repetitive) day. Each day for years he hires the same new piano teacher, for example, persuades her he needs a piano lesson and gradually becomes quite proficient. But Andie MacDowell lives each day over as if it had never happened, and that’s true of all the other characters in the movie. The progress of his feelings over time may be very natural, but the progress of her feelings is much more complicated. That’s true of all the other characters in the movie, except perhaps the male cameraman whose feelings do not seem to evolve at all.

MacDowell does warm to Murray, though, and indeed so do almost all the residents of Punxsutawney. At one point MacDowell says “how does everybody know you? You come here one day a year and you’re the most popular person in town!”

Stephen King sometimes refers to geographical places where reality is “thin” and you can see various alternate realities underneath the veneer of our own everyday reality. That’s what happens in Groundhog Day – all the different interactions Murray has with everybody are allowed to have a layering effect so that, indeed, he is the most popular guy in town by the end of the movie. MacDowell’s experiences of sexual harassment rapidly fade out and are scarcely ever mentioned, but other of his negative traits take a little more time to work their way out of his system. As they do, though, they are replaced by layer after layer of his loving her. He is thoroughly redeemed by this love, and she is able to end up in bed with him without being a slut, although the movie does make clear they didn’t have sex. How this is all accomplished is what makes me admire the movie so much.

The director and producer knew what they were doing, as the words “deja vue” are twice spoken, once by Murray, once by MacDowell. MacDowell’s is the more interesting, because it seems to be a peering under the surface of everyday reality and seeing that yes, she has been here before. The way everyone came to know Murray could not have been accidental, and the way it was gradually allowed to increase over time must have involved tricks of scene, lighting, and wording. I’d be interested to hear the movie analyzed by a movie-maker. In any event, Murray’s popularity at the end seems very natural and unremarkable.

Remarkable.

One movie critic, Lindsey Weedston in Your Favorite Movies are Misogynistic summarizes Groundhog Day as: “Man is asshole. Universe messes with him till he learns not to be an asshole. Is rewarded with beautiful woman.” I won’t necessarily disagree with this summary, but I think Murray’s evolution is a little more rewarding than that, and MacDowell’s character is likewise much richer than merely “beautiful woman.” But she is wonderfully beautiful in some of the scenes, and her love would be ample reward. Perhaps it is significant, though, that it comes after he has learned to live for something other than rewards.

But that’s another topic.

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[1] Apparently Groundhog Day created a huge rift between Murray and Harold Ramis, the producer, because Murray wanted the movie to be philosophical rather than a frivolous love comedy. If by any chance Murray ever sees this review, perhaps he will see that he got his way more than he initially believed.