Background
The term "class warfare"
seems to have originated with American linguist and
philosopher Noam Chomsky in the latter part of the twentieth century.
However, the concept behind the term harkens back at least to the French
Revolution, when the impoverished and downtrodden peasantry rose up
against the wealthy and powerful aristocracy to put an end to the
long tradition of abuse of the poor by the rich. The
revolutionaries substituted for that old tradition a new one: abuse of the rich by the poor, or
as it turned out in
practice,
persecution and extermination of the relatively privileged by
the self-declared representatives of the as yet unprivileged.
Once the original aristocrats had been done away
with, the latest crop of revolutionaries to attain positions
of authority in the new order then became the new
"relatively privileged," and hence the targets
of new purges. And so things went for some time, in a self-perpetuating cycle
known as "the reign of terror."
Historical class warfare in America: Apart from the atrocities of slavery and segregation, what passes for class
warfare in the United States has in most cases been relatively
tame. To be sure, there have been bloody and even deadly clashes
of
labor activists with company goons, police, and even the National
Guard. Confrontations in the
tobacco, textile, mining, manufacturing, and transportation
industries have been part of a strife-torn history, out of which
a thriving and stable middle class, including a huge number of
skilled workers in addition to the traditional merchants and
professionals, gradually emerged. Meanwhile, a graduated income tax
and government aid to the poor helped to de-stratify personal
income and blunt economic class boundaries, reducing the social
friction that arises therefrom. As organized labor
became more accepted and general prosperity escalated—even
for business executives and shareholders, whose long-term
profits actually increased with burgeoning consumer demand fueled
by more generous wages and benefits—all sides came around to
the view that it was in everyone's interest to resolve issues
through collective bargaining instead of coercion and violence.
Well,
nearly all sides. There are still some inclined to
think of themselves, the haves (and have-wannabes), as "the
deserving," and the have-nots as "the undeserving," according
to circularly reasoned criteria they consider self-evident. To the
haves, any effort to tax wealth
with the purpose "to promote the general welfare" is a socialist plot
to deprive the deserving of what's rightfully theirs
and to give it to the undeserving. Now, though myopic,
this viewpoint isn't entirely without basis. Capitalism has demonstrated itself the most
generally prosperous and self-sustaining economic system yet devised. It
accomplishes this through incentives to innovative
entrepreneurs willing to accept a measure of risk in exchange
for a prospect of profit.
This is, in the main, a good
thing. However, it doesn't follow that unrestrained
capitalism is the answer to all problems and prayers.
Capitalism has inherent difficulties. One is a tendency
to dismiss larger problems of human well-being in favor of
tunnel-vision pursuit of profit, leading to abuse of
workers, consumers, and public health and safety, as well as
to cutthroat competition. Another is the exaggeration of economic fluctuations,
leading to cyclical boom-and-bust
alternations of prosperity and recession. In the absence of competent regulation,
such pressures and instabilities can
prove catastrophic to a majority of people who have no
interest in "playing the system," but must rely on that system
for their daily bread and long-term security.
Practical Meanings of Wealth and Earning
To get a more rounded picture of what American economic class
warfare is, let's consider some of the basics of what our
economic system does and who's responsible.
What is wealth?
Wealth is money, right? That's probably how most people
see it, because they're accustomed to thinking about such
concepts at the level of simple utility and surface
appearance, not underlying substance. If we dig deeper, though, we come to realize that real material and
intellectual wealth (leaving spiritual wealth aside as an
unquantifiable and thus separate matter) resides in the goods
and services that people design, produce, sell, buy, use, and
enjoy.
Money is just an easily transferable symbol of wealth.
Money represents the value of the labor and expertise of those who actually
create those goods and services, and who present them for sale to others willing to exchange some
monetary symbols of their own
labor and expertise in order to obtain them. So, if we
want to be clear about what we mean by producing and earning
wealth (as opposed to merely "making money," an ambiguous and
misleading notion), we need to understand who actually creates
wealth.
Productive labor: Wealth creators are producers.
A producer is, for example, the miner who digs ore out of the earth, the smelter who refines the ore into metal, the
factory worker who fashions the metal into finished products,
and the engineer who designs those products. The
creator of wealth is
also the technician who services and repairs appliances, vehicles,
or other equipment, to restore or enhance their usefulness. He's the field hand who plants,
tends, and harvests the grain, and the baker who turns it into
bread. She's the textile worker who processes raw fibers
into fabric, and the garment maker who, using
patterns created by a designer,
fashions the fabric into items of apparel. He's the
physician who examines the patient, diagnoses the ailment, and
prescribes an appropriate treatment. She's the teacher
who strives to give a classroom full of goofy kids the knowledge and
skills they'll need in order to function as workers and
professionals, not to mention a new generation of teachers in an evolving
world.
Non-producing labor: Production workers aren't the
whole picture. There's the key matter of furnishing
workers with materials, tools, facilities, and training, as
well as arranging transportation to bring in materials and move products
out to market. And there's the matter of deciding just
what goods or services are to be produced, not to
mention the clerking and accounting needed to keep track of
inventory and cash moving into and out of the business.
Although none of these activities is directly part of
production, all are necessary to the planning, procurement, production,
shipping, and marketing process, and thus are
legitimate costs of doing business. The business must
charge enough for the product to cover all these costs, plus sufficient profit to attract investors.
Investors
and bankers: Although most investors don't directly contribute to production
(unless they're also employees of the firm), they put up the cash to buy or lease land, buildings, and
equipment—capital—with the expectation that they'll receive some
monetary compensation in exchange for their willingness to
risk a portion of their assets on the enterprise.
And bankers provide the indispensable service of channeling money from those who
have it to those who need it—at modest rates of interest, of course.
All of these taken together add something to the
cost of actually creating the product that a business offers
for sale. Still, if the business is competently run,
we'd expect the cost to remain within reason.
Executives: Nowadays
we'd
expect a competent and experienced business leader to be
educated, shrewd, and well connected enough to develop the vision and the organization to get the job
of business done. We'd expect
this superior education, shrewdness, and connectedness to come at a price somewhat
higher than the wage of an ordinary worker—say,
something in the range of twice to a hundred times an
unskilled laborer's pay, depending on the magnitude, complexity, and
success of the
operation.
We'd expect
planning and problem-solving to be the main focus of upper
management, and that this focus would be reflected in design, materials, energy, and
production as the main operating costs, and in a fair profit as a major objective.
In addition, we rely on executives to maintain a high level of integrity,
so as not to be distracted in ways that could skew these
priorities. Otherwise, execs might be tempted to become schemers rather than planners,
cutting corners, dodging
regulations and safeguards, and focusing more on lobbying, special deals, and annual
bonuses, than on honest, long-term production of quality
products in a safe and humane work environment at competitive prices.
If executive integrity is lacking, everyone suffers. Integrity is therefore certainly worth something to investors,
workers, and customers alike, and ought to be fairly rewarded,
so as to attract and retain high-quality individuals.
Sometimes—all too often lately—corporate top executives come
to expect and demand, even for a hopelessly botched job, to be
paid many hundreds or even thousands of times what they pay
the people whose honest effort and expertise actually create
the firm's material and intellectual wealth. When a perhaps moderately visionary and clever, yet otherwise not
very productive person routinely amasses, during a day at the
office, or even in an hour on the golf course, more than a productive
wealth-creating worker is paid in an entire year, we must
critically question whether the actual
contribution of such moderate vision and cleverness to the per-unit product value indeed justifies
such a reward. Perhaps there is the occasional odd
instance in which an extraordinary payout is justified by a truly
extraordinary individual's unique combination of talents, organizational genius, revolutionary
vision, self-sacrificing dedication, inspirational leadership,
and outstanding achievement. But in all too many cases we'd be
hard put to justify the expense in terms of value received by
the firm—let alone when the leader's leadership has led, not to
outstanding success, but to deterioration or even ruin.
Gross overcompensation for failing, mediocre, or even marginally
above average performance is a brand of class
warfare that makes organized labor and progressive
taxation look like spitballs and spears pitted
against machine guns and tanks.
Speculators: Finally, there's another group, which
inserts itself between producer and consumer, and which is
distinguished by the fact that it's utterly unproductive in
any sense. Speculators, who buy and sell things hoping to make marginal
gains on the transactions, do not add even the slightest
value to the things they buy and sell. The extent of
their "service" is simply
to inflate the price to the end purchaser. (Ticket scalpers
are an obvious example, but speculators in food, fuel, and
other vital commodities are a
far bigger problem for most people—and for the economy as a
whole.)
Speculators' peculiar view of
"making money" has nothing to do with creating wealth, but is
rather a scheme to divert into their own pockets a portion of
wealth produced and facilitated entirely by others, thus leaving the rest of
us correspondingly a little worse off. In most cases speculation
is perfectly legal, for it's an expected part of any routine
transaction. And professional speculators doubtless
consider themselves hard-working and respectable. But in the overall
picture, their
"profession" is functionally indistinguishable from
common parasitism. Market speculation is one of the few
professions whose products—stress, uncertainty, price swings,
and inflationary pressure—are not only one hundred percent
waste, but also incapable of being disposed of in a way that
prevents harm. The one remotely positive thing one might say about
speculation one's sole way of making a living is that it keeps its practitioners more than amply fed and clothed
(albeit at others' expense), so that, lacking any truly productive
skills, they needn't resort
to panhandling and purse-snatching instead.
How
Wealth Stratification Cripples Prosperity
We can put
up with such parasitism to some extent, so long as conditions
remain tolerable for investors,
producers, and consumers. What we
can't put up with are the economic difficulties that systemic
disproportionate distribution and excessive stratification of
wealth impose on our economic system.
The
multiplier effect of money in circulation: Money in
active circulation has
what economists call a "multiplier effect,"
which we can explain using a simplified
illustration. Suppose we trace a dollar paid to a
construction worker in return for a certain amount of his labor. The worker
uses the dollar to buy a burger for his lunch. The
restaurant operator who sells him the burger in turn pays a
dollar to his meat supplier, who pays it to a meat processor,
who pays it to a cattleman, who in turn buys feed with it, and
the feed seller uses the dollar to buy an air freshener for
her store. In other words, the dollar doesn't disappear
when it goes into the construction worker's pocket; it
continues to be used in a chain of subsequent transactions
until it eventually ends up, say, in someone's retirement
fund. Each time the dollar changes hands, it
benefits both the buyer and the seller in some way. The
movement of the dollar through the economy thus brings several
dollars worth of benefit in its migrations from pocket to
pocket, with the cash moving in one direction as goods and
services move in the other.
A dollar deposited in savings, on the other
hand, has little more than potential value, which isn't realized until
it's ultimately withdrawn and spent on something that can be
used or enjoyed.
As long as it's not in active circulation, the dollar has no
dynamic multiplier effect, yielding only a relatively small
percentage in interest or dividends. Indeed, if it's
just kept under a mattress or in a safe, its buying power
actually erodes due to inflation.
Loss of the multiplier effect isn't a problem for a single
dollar, for a middle-income family's savings, or for a bank's
normal cash reserves. But it becomes a problem when a
large proportion of an economy's money is locked up in the
cash hoards of a few extremely wealthy individuals and
corporations, leaving relatively little money in active
circulation to generate demand for goods and services.
This isn't to say that saving money is bad, but an economy
needs to have a major proportion of its money in circulation
if it's to prosper. When it doesn't, demand sags,
production slows, workers are laid off, income declines,
demand drops further, and so on. As sales drop, profits
dwindle, and nervous investors pull out of the market,
hoarding even more cash and depressing security market values.
The economy enters a recessionary spiral, in the end hurting
even the hoarders as the returns on their savings diminish.
This is why it's a bad idea
for ninety percent of a nation's
money to end up in the hands of relatively few individuals, whether
or not their claims to have earned it (presumably by
personally providing
ninety percent of the resources, expertise, and labor?) are credible.
History shows that hoarded cash tends to stay put.
Wishful claims of supply-side theory notwithstanding, it neither trickles down to
the middle class nor circulates
to spur business activity. Furthermore, no savvy
businessperson will invest in increased production and hiring
when there's insufficient demand for what's already being
produced. So-called "job creators" are in business to
make money; creating jobs costs money, so they don't do this
unless there's more money to be made by doing so. When the objective is to invigorate a sluggish
economy, handing out more money to people who aren't motivated
to spend what they already have is no more effective than
pushing a rope. (If the "haves" were truly as deserving
as they assume, then they ought to be bright enough to
understand this and forthright enough to speak out about it.
But apparently only a few, like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, are.)
Combating
Excessive Stratification
Ideally, business leaders would voluntarily arrange to pay
themselves, their employees, and investors proportionately to
each person's contribution to wealth production. But
since this doesn't seem to be in the cards in most cases,
intervention of some sort appears necessary.
A
graduated progressive tax code: The primary reason
for taxation is, of course, for government to collect the
money it needs to operate on the people's behalf, to provide
and maintain the public services and
infrastructure that modern society needs and
expects. What we pay in taxes is no more "our money"
than what we pay for groceries or utilities; it's money we
owe in exchange for services rendered and
goods delivered, whether these take the form of fuel in the car
or roads to drive on, home appliances or emergency response, a
watchdog or national defense.
The purpose of the progressive graduation of tax rates is to
collect a larger share from those who
profit disproportionately from our system of economics and
governance—the rich—and who thus are most abundantly able to
pay for the operation and upkeep of this wonderful system that
benefits them so much. This allows the tax burden on
low- and middle-income people to be reduced, thus leaving more
cash in active circulation (since people with lower incomes
must spend a greater percentage of their income simply to
survive). Taxation also provides public money to be
spent on essential services for the indigent, many of whom are
unemployed or underemployed through no fault of their own, who
don't have enough income to owe tax on it, and who thus
receive no benefit from income-tax cuts.
Redistribution of wealth: Yes, this is undeniably one
of the effects of any tax system. The direction of
redistribution is determined by whether the tax is progressive
(on income), which shifts the tax burden toward the rich, or
regressive (on property or sales), which shifts the burden
toward the poor and middle class. Many who complain
about progressive taxation call it "punishing success."
They object that it takes some of their
hard-earned money and gives it to others who presumably don't
deserve it. But as we've already noted, much of executives' and speculators'
income is
actually earned by others: the workers whose talent, training,
and steady toil create the wealth, while the less productive wheeler-dealers
lunch and golf with clients, brokers, and politicians.
The income redistribution represented by the progressive tax
code can be seen as a modest attempt to return a portion of
that enormous hard-earned wealth, in some form, to those who've actually done
the truly hard part of the earning. It's not about
soaking the rich or punishing success. It's about making
the economy work proportionately for everyone who's helped build it,
from the truly visionary and innovative corporate leaders to
the actual wealth producers on farms, assembly lines,
construction sites, engineering staff,
and in classrooms, laboratories, medical facilities and mines.
Adding insult to injury:
High-end tax brackets are only a start toward restoring proportionality
of wealth distribution. Much of the abuse comes from reduced tax rates on investment
income—income that the investor doesn't actually earn by his
or her own efforts, but comes from the labor of the people who
work for the firm to create a marketable product. Sales of the product generate
profits, which yield dividends,
which are paid to investors. And if the value of the
stock increases (as often happens when dividends increase),
then the capital gain on the stock when it's sold also counts
as investment income. Thus, people whose income is mainly from investments pay a lower overall tax rate
than applies to the paychecks of workers who do the actual production.
No one denies we need
investors, or that they deserve compensation for their
risk-taking. But taxing income earned by active
production at a higher rate than unearned income from
investment is effectively a government subsidy to those whose
income is actually earned, not by themselves, but by others,
as well as a tax penalty against those productive earners.
The very idea is an insult to our traditional work ethic.
How did such an injustice
come to be? It's not too hard to figure out.
Wealthy investors collectively lobby government for special tax breaks for
themselves, often offering campaign contributions as
"persuasion." For someone whose investments generate a
million dollars a year, on which they'd owe, let's say, four
hundred thousand if taxed at their standard marginal bracket
rate, it's cost effective to donate a hundred thousand dollars
to a political fund in order to have their tax bill reduced by
two hundred thousand or more (and the tax burden thus shifted
to someone else—the producers). And the investor himself
doesn't even have to make the contribution; if he and other
major investors in the firm have enough corporate clout to have the
firm make the contribution on behalf of all
shareholders. Though this might have the effect of
slightly reducing the
company's dividend, the lower tax rate more than compensates
for that minor inconvenience to major investors.
Now, there are three
objections that might be made to the removal of tax breaks on
investment income. First, there's the rationale that
such breaks are beneficial because they encourage investment. But this is a
fatuous
claim; dividends on investment—typically many times the
interest earned on an equivalent bank savings account—is
itself adequate incentive to invest, even considering the
marginally higher risk. Second, many
retired people also rely on investment income, so taking away the
tax break for wealthy investors would deprive these people of
it as well. However, it turns out that the tax break
doesn't offer much of a reward, if any, to low-income
retirees, since the few thousands that their investments
typically generate often don't add up to enough to be taxable
anyway. Third, it's argued that raising tax rates on
both long- and short-term gains to the same level would
eliminate the disincentive for market speculation. But if
such disincentive is needed (as we agree it is), then it could just as easily, and
indeed more effectively, take the form of a tax surcharge,
above the taxpayer's marginal rate on such gains—perhaps
prompting some non-productive speculators to acquire some
productive skills. The
removal of such tax breaks would constitute a win for most
people, by increasing general revenues enough to make it possible
either to augment government services or to
reduce tax rates generally, or both.
Reality
check: Creating loopholes and doing away with higher
tax brackets for those with disproportionately high incomes
has been aptly derided as "welfare for the wealthy" (or simply
"wealth-fare"). When it occurs, at least one of three
other things must also happen as a result of the diminished
revenue:
-
taxes must be raised on the
middle class to compensate; and / or...
-
government services—usually to
the poor and the middle class—must be cut; or else...
-
if neither of these happens, then government
debt increases, thus raising interest rates, thus inhibiting
production and aggravating
inflation.
In any case, there's no free lunch. The
burden does not magically vanish. In one form or another,
it's shifted to middle- and low-income families. The effect is to redistribute wealth
upward, from the productive wealth creators, to the already well
off denizens of executive suites
and investment banks. The irony is that
high-income "haves" then claim to have "earned" the wealth
that others have applied their expertise and energy to create
for them. Then they're surprised if those others express
skepticism of such a claim; they're dismayed if government takes a
larger chunk of what they've "earned" to pay for the operation
of a system of economics and governance that rewards them
disproportionately; and they're outraged that one function of
this system is to provide
services and relief to those they deem undeserving.
The new class warfare: We can call it that if we
like; it's a fair enough metaphor for something whose motives
and effects are not dissimilar to those of war, minus the
noise and gore (at least until the street riots erupt).
This being said, we must bear in mind that in every war there
are at least two sides. In this war, the sides are
"need" and "greed," and greed is clearly the aggressor—as it
was during the pre-Roosevelt gilded age of "robber barons,"
and has been again in the post-Reagan era. If greed wins
and need is ignored, then everyone loses as money tightens; it
just takes the greedy a while longer to notice the pinch that
everyone else has felt all along, as a once robust economy's
vitality bleeds away into stagnant cash hoards. Or if
need wins and greed is outlawed, then everyone loses when
capitalism's primary incentive for investment and innovation
evaporates.
But if a prudent balance is struck, if personal distribution
of wealth is made proportionate to personal contribution to
its production, then the conflict can be resolved. Need concedes
the necessity of moderated greed as a legitimate economic
driving force,
while greed concedes that concerns such as justice, safety,
health, social harmony, and long-term general prosperity are
of greater real value than short-term personal profit. And everyone—poor,
middle, or rich—ultimately benefits from an
equitable, stable, and thriving economy in the long
term. As a bonus, crime rates and social unrest subside
when people are able to afford the basic necessities of food,
shelter, clothing, and medical care, plus enough education to
make and keep them competitively productive in an evolving
world.
The
many who actually contribute the effort and expertise to create material
and intellectual wealth
are rightly entitled to a fair share of its returns. The
relative few who, by their own choice, contribute relatively
little or nothing to the creation of wealth shouldn't be
helping themselves to most of it.
But as long as
they continue to do so, the haves have no grounds for
complaint if government exercises its proper role, acting on
behalf of the people and in accord with the spirit of the
Constitution—to establish justice, insure domestic
tranquility, and promote the general welfare—to take
reasonable steps to counteract abuse of the powerless many by
the influential few.
Historical
Lessons
It isn't
just theory. There're inescapable reasons that
inflexible ideologies fail in a world whose reality is utterly
indifferent to human notions of what ought to be true.
We and our parents and grandparents have seen it happen
repeatedly:
-
in the 1920s, Coolidge & Hoover's
laissez faire policy produced a postwar boom marked by deregulation and rampant
speculation, eventually followed by economic collapse and the Great Depression;
-
in the late
1950s, Eisenhower's tax breaks for business did nothing at
all to spur it, and his attempt to balance the federal budget
simply drove the economy deeper into recession;
-
during the
1980s, Reagan & Bush I's deregulation and supply-side
economics were followed by bank failures, double-digit
unemployment, successive waves of recession, and massive
increases in the national debt;
-
and again in the 2000s, Bush
II's elimination
of upper-income tax brackets (and retaining those cuts in time
of war, no less!) rapidly turned a projected surplus inherited from
the Clinton administration into skyrocketing debt,
eroded middle-class purchasing power, and
culminated in the large-scale bank failures and financial gridlock
that launched the "Great
Recession" of 2007-2009.
Each time,
the "trickle down" ideology of capitalist absolutism declared
that deregulation and tax breaks for the wealthy would somehow stimulate production and hiring even when
business couldn't find buyers for what it already produced, and made the same
alluring promise: to invigorate business, to increase profits
and payroll, and thus to increase tax revenues sufficiently to
make up the shortfall from the rate cuts. Each time, the
gullible voting public fell for it. And each time, the ideology's
promise failed to
come true, and in at least two instances ultimately
contributed to global economic calamity.
Let's think
about this: If trickle-down theory actually worked as
advertised, then the economy should have been in a state of
continuous boom and declining debt through 1929 into the
1930s, and through 2007 into the 2010s, under policies of
wholesale deregulation and slashed tax rates for corporations and the wealthy
during the preceding several years. The fact that the economy collapsed,
banks and businesses went bankrupt, and debt
mounted instead is a clear indicator that the theory is based
on hopeful fantasy, not on solid economic reality. And the fact
that every time it's been tried, the same general pattern of
boom and bust recurs, should lay any lingering doubts to rest.
But it's a lesson still waiting to be learned. During the ninety years from 1920 through 2010, roughly a
third of of this time was spent trying and failing, and
another third clawing our way out of those failures, leaving
just the remaining third to uncompromised prosperity. Anyone who's
been paying attention would have to conclude that the
permanent retirement of supply-side ideology is long overdue.
To be fair,
we've also seen the results of the opposing ideology as well,
when communism, the misdirected savior of the downtrodden,
turned out to be unworkable in practice. The promised
benign proletarian dictatorship never materializes, being
displaced by heavy-handed oligarchy or (under Stalin)
totalitarian autocracy. Instead of anticipation of
personal gain as incentive, communism relies on penalizing
failure to maintain arbitrary quotas. And it ultimately
collapses under a combination of the harsh reality of its own
economic impotence, internal pressure from reformers, and
external competition.
Both
communism and laissez-faire capitalism operate under
the delusion that some authority—the state in the case of the
former, and business in the case of the latter—can arbitrarily
redefine reality, truth, value, and merit to suit its own agenda. Such
misguided and obsolete ways of thinking should long since have
disappeared, along with other outmoded artifacts of their era:
ice boxes, carpet beaters, car engine hand cranks,
prohibition, and pre-anesthetic dental surgery.
The Responsibility for
Stability
But some,
whether on the right or on the left, never learn.
Ignoring historical fact, they're determined to repeat the
errors of cherished ideologies consistently demonstrated
false. Printing IN GOD WE TRUST on our symbols of wealth
cannot excuse, let alone fix, what the people whom we elect break,
whether through ignorance, malice, or misplaced conviction.
If we
desire, for ourselves and our descendants, never again to fall victim to the ill effects
of long discredited policies, then it's up to us, as citizens
of the 21st century, to consider soberly which
ideas have worked and which have not, and to sweep the latter into the dust
bin of history and close the lid. It's up to us, as
reasoning observers, to help our fellow citizens see through the fog
of smokescreen issues (e.g., government-imposed "family"
values, states' rights, gun rights, creationism, isolationism,
simplistic fiscal policy, and corporate propaganda), on
the basis of which
charlatans and their dupes continue to get themselves elected.
It's up to us, as informed and determined voters, to ensure
that throwback ne'er-do-wells no longer get into
positions of power, or if they do, that they're removed at the
earliest opportunity after
the error becomes evident. At stake is the well-being of
rich and poor alike in a humanely prosperous society, and the solution is our
responsibility. If we shirk the latter, then we'll
surely forfeit the former, and deservedly so.
=SAJ=