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Subject: The God That Sucked Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2002 23:26:35 -0600

The God That Sucked

Thomas Frank

...Despite this, many economists still think that electricity deregulation 
will work.  A product is a product, they say, and competition always works 
better than state control.  "I believe in that premise as a matter of 
religious faith," said Philip J.  Romero, dean of the business school at the 
University of Oregon and one of the architects of California's deregulation 
plan.

- -New York Times, February 4, 2001

Time was, the only place a guy could expound the mumbo jumbo of the free 
market was in the country club locker room or the pages of Reader's Digest.  
Spout off about it anywhere else and you'd be taken for a Bircher or some 
new strain of Jehovah's Witness.  After all, in the America of 1968, when 
the great backlash began, the average citizen, whether housewife or hardhat 
or salary-man, still had an all-too-vivid recollection of the Depression.  
Not to mention a fairly clear understanding of what social class was all 
about.  Pushing laissez-faire ideology back then had all the prestige and 
credibility of hosting a Tupperware party.

But thirty-odd years of culture war have changed all that.  Mention "elites" 
these days and nobody thinks of factory owners or gated-community dwellers.  
Instead they assume that what you're mad as hell about is the liberal media, 
or the pro-criminal judiciary, or the tenured radicals, or the know-it-all 
bureaucrats.

For the guys down at the country club all these inverted forms of class war 
worked spectacularly well.  This is not to say that the right-wing culture 
warriors ever outsmarted the liberal college professors or shut down the 
Hollywood studios or repealed rock 'n' roll.  Shout though they might, they 
never quite got cultural history to stop.  But what they did win was far 
more important: political power, a free hand to turn back the clock on such 
non-glamorous issues as welfare, taxes, OSHA, even the bankruptcy laws, for 
chrissake.  Assuring their millionaire clients that culture war got the 
deregulatory job done, they simply averted their eyes as bizarre backlash 
variants flowered in the burned-over districts of conservatism: Posses 
Comitatus, backyard Confederacies mounting mini-secessions, crusades against 
Darwin.

For most of the duration of the thirty-year backlash, the free-market faiths 
of the economists and the bosses were kept discreetly in the background.  To 
be sure, market worship was always the established church in the halls of 
Republican power, but in public the chant was usually States' Rights, or 
Down with Big Gummint, or Watch out for Commies, or Speak English Goddammit. 
  All Power to the Markets has never been too persuasive as a rallying cry.

So confidently did the right proceed from triumph to triumph, though, that 
eventually they forgot this.  Inspired by a generous bull market and puffed 
up by a sense of historical righteousness so cocksure that it might have 
been lifted from The God That Failed, that old book in which ex-Communists 
disavowed their former convictions, the right evidently decided in the 
Nineties that the time had come to tell the world about the wonders of the 
market.

Dinesh D'Souza, pedagogical product of the Jesuits, these days can be found 
swinging the censer for Mammon and thrilling to the mayhem his ruthless "god 
of the market" visits on the undeserving poor.  George Gilder, erstwhile 
elder of the Christian right, is now the Thirty-Third Degree Poobah in the 
Temple of Telecosm, where he channels the libertarian commandments of his 
digital Juggernaut in the language of the angels.

A host of awesome myths attest to the power of this new god.  Markets must 
rule, some right-wing prophets tell us, because of "globalization," because 
the moral weight of the entire world somehow demands it.  Others bear 
tidings of a "New Economy," a spontaneous recombination of the DNA of social 
life according to which, again, markets simply must rule.  The papers fill 
with rapturous talk of historical corners turned, of old structures 
abandoned, of endless booms and weightless work.

The new god makes great demands on us, and its demands must be appeased.  
None can be shielded from its will.  The welfare of AFDC mothers must be 
entrusted unhesitatingly to its mercies.  Workers of every description must 
learn its discipline, must sacrifice all to achieve flexibility, to create 
shareholder value.  The professional, the intellectual, the manager must 
each shed their pride and own up to their flawed, lowly natures, must 
acknowledge their impotence and insensibility before its divine logic.  We 
put our health care system in its invisible hands, and to all appearances it 
botches the job.  Yet the faith of the believers is not shaken.  We 
deregulate the banking industry.  Deregulate the broadcasters.  Deregulate 
electricity.  Halt antitrust.  Make plans to privatize Social Security and 
to privatize the public schools.

And to those who worry about the cost of all this, the market's disciples 
speak of mutual funds, of IPOs, of online trading, of early retirement.  All 
we have to do is believe, take our little pile of treasure down to the god's 
house on Wall Street, and the market rewards us with riches undreamed of in 
human history.  It gives us a Nasdaq that is the envy of the world and a 
401(k) for each of us to call his own.

Then, one fine day, you check in at Ameritrade and find that your tech 
portfolio is off 90 percent.  Your department at work has been right-sized, 
meaning you spend a lot more time at the office-without getting a raise.  
You have one kid in college to the tune of $30,000 a year, another with no 
health insurance because she's working as a temp.  Or maybe you lost your 
job because they can do it cheaper in Alabama or Mexico.  Your daughter's 
got a disease that requires $400 a month in drugs, and your COBRA insurance 
benefits are due to run out in two months.  Or maybe you're the Mexican 
worker who just got a new maquiladora job.  You have no electricity, no 
running water, no school for your children, no health care, and your wage is 
below subsistence level.  And should you make any effort to change these 
conditions-say, by organizing a union not aligned with the corrupt 
PRI-you're likely to get blacklisted by local factory managers.

That's when it dawns on you: The market is a god that sucks.  Yes, it cashed 
a few out at the tippy top, piled up the loot of the world at their feet, 
delivered shiny Lexuses into the driveways of their ten-bedroom suburban 
chateaux.  But for the rest of us the very principles that make the market 
the object of D'Souza's worship, of Gilder's awestruck piety, are the forces 
that conspire to make life shitty in a million ways great and small.  The 
market is the reason our housing is so expensive.  It is the reason our 
public transportation is lousy.  It is the reason our cities sprawl 
idiotically all across the map.  It is the reason our word processing 
programs stink and our prescription drugs cost more than anywhere else.  In 
order that a fortunate few might enjoy a kind of prosperity unequaled in 
human history, the rest of us have had to abandon ourselves to a lifetime of 
casual employment, to unquestioning obedience within an ever-more arbitrary 
and despotic corporate regime, to medical care available on a 
maybe/maybe-not basis, to a housing market interested in catering only to 
the fortunate.  In order for the libertarians of Orange County to enjoy the 
smug sleep of the true believer, the thirty millions among whom they live 
must join them in the dark.

But it is not enough to count the ways in which the market sucks.  This is a 
deity of spectacular theological agility, supported by a priesthood of 
millions: journalists, admen, politicians, Op-Ed writers, think-tankers, 
cyberspace scrawlers, Sunday morning talk-show libertarians, and, of course, 
bosses, all of them united in the conviction that, no matter what, the 
market can't be held responsible.  When things go wrong only we are to 
blame.  After all, they remind us, every step in the economic process is a 
matter of choice.  We choose Ford over Dodge and Colgate Total over Colgate 
Ultra-Whitening; we choose to take that temp job at Microsoft, to live in 
those suburbs, to watch Channel 4 rather than Channel 5.  We participate in 
markets; we build markets; markets, in fact, are us.  Markets are a 
straightforward expression of the popular will.  Since markets are the 
product of our choices, we have essentially authorized whatever the market 
does to us.  This is the world that we have made, let us rejoice and be glad 
in it.

Virtually any deed can be excused by this logic.  The stock market, in 
recent years a scene of no small amount of deceit, misinformation, and 
manipulation, can be made to seem quite benign when the high priests roll up 
their sleeves.  In October 1999, a heady time for small investors, Andy 
Serwer of Fortune could be heard telling the inspiring story of an 
investment "revolution" in which the financial power of "a few thousand 
white males" in New York was "being seized by Everyman and Everywoman."  We 
the people had great, unquestionable power: Serwer's article was even 
illustrated with clenched fists.  We had built this market, and it was 
rewarding us accordingly.

But these days Serwer is pondering the problem of "stock market rage" as 
those same Everyman investors are turned inside out by the destruction of $4 
trillion of Nasdaq value.  Now that the country is in the sort of situation 
where brokers and bankers might find themselves in deep political shit, 
Serwer observes that we have become quite powerless.  Investors are "mad as 
hell," Serwer notes, but "there isn't much [they] can do about it."  The 
explanation for this supposed impotence is, strangely, a moral one: Choice.  
Since those lovable little guys acted of their own free will when they 
invested in Lucent, PMC Sierra, and Cisco, today there is no claim they can 
make that deserves a hearing.  What has happened is their fault and theirs 
alone.

The market only fails us, it seems, when we fail it-when our piety is 
somehow incomplete, when we don't give the market enough power, when we balk 
at entrusting it with our last dime.  Electricity deregulation didn't work 
in California, the true believers chant, because the scheming elitist 
political class of that state betrayed the people, refusing to give them 
enough choice, to deregulate all the way.

Free to choose is a painfully ironic slogan for the market order.  While 
markets do indeed sometimes provide a great array of consumer choices, the 
clear intention of much of the chatter about technology, "globalization," 
and the "New Economy" is, in fact, to deny us any choice at all.  Moving 
from rhetoric to the world of financial politics the same logic holds true: 
Markets show a clear preference for the shutting down of intellectual 
dissent and political choice.  Markets romp joyfully when word arrives that 
the vote-counting has been halted.  Markets punish the bond prices of 
countries where substantial left parties still flourish.  Markets reward 
those lands-like Bill Clinton's USA-where left parties have been 
triangulated into impotence.  So predictably do markets celebrate the 
suppression of political difference that Thomas Friedman, the highly 
respected New York Times columnist, has actually come up with a term for the 
trade-off: "the golden straitjacket."  Since all alternatives to 
laissez-faire are now historically discredited, Friedman maintains, all 
countries must now adopt the same rigidly pro-business stance.  When they 
do, "your economy grows and your politics shrink."  The pseudodemocracy of 
markets replaces the real democracy of democracy; the great multinational 
corporations nod their approval; and the way is clear for (some) people to 
get fantastically rich.

Friedman has a point.  Consider the case of Singapore, long the inamorata of 
market heavies and their press agents.  As we all know by now, Singapore is 
an economic miracle, a land arisen from Third World to First in a handful of 
decades.  Singapore is the land with the most economic freedom in the world. 
  Singapore is more comprehensively wired than anywhere else.  Singapore is 
the best place to do business in all the earth.  And as proof you need look 
no further than a postcard of Singapore's glittering downtown, at all the 
spanking new skyscrapers erupting from the earth in stern testimony to the 
market's approval.

And what the market loves best about Singapore is what is absent: Politics.  
Singapore's shopping malls-heavenly landscapes of chrome and polished 
granite, of flashing jumbotrons and free floor shows for the kids-trump 
those of our own land.  But politically the country is a dull monotone.  
Here there is little danger that opposition parties will come to power or 
that crusading journalists will violate the rules of what Singaporeans call 
"self-censorship."

So what replaces politics?  What fills the blank space left when a country 
has sacrificed dissent on the altar of the market?  In Singapore, the answer 
seems to be management theory.  Settling down one Sunday afternoon in that 
country with a copy of the Straits-Times, the more or less official 
newspaper, I turned to the section most American newspapers reserve for book 
reviews and think-pieces and found instead: a profile of the management guru 
who co-wrote the One to One series of marketing books; a column about the 
urgent need to adapt to waves of workplace "change" (you know, like 
"outsourcing"); an enthusiastic story about the new president of PepsiCo, a 
native of India who reportedly studies videotapes of Michael Jordan's 
greatest basketball moments in order to "catch insights about the value of 
teamwork"; a profile of the management guru who co-wrote The Individualized 
Corporation ("Power to the people is [his] motto"); a profile of one of the 
paper's writers in which the concept of "the journalist as a brand" is the 
point of departure; and a review of one of those sweeping, pseudo-historical 
books so beloved of business readers that start out with the Neanderthals 
and end up affirming various contemporary management homilies about 
creativity and entrepreneurship.

Management theory has become so variegated in recent years that, for some, 
it now constitutes a perfectly viable replacement for old-fashioned 
intellectual life.  There's so much to choose from!  So many deep thinkers, 
so many flashy popularizers, so many schools of thought, so many bold 
predictions, so many controversies!

For all this vast and sparkling intellectual production, though, we hear 
surprisingly little about what it's like to be managed.  Perhaps the reason 
for this is because, when viewed from below, all the glittering, dazzling 
theories of management seem to come down to the same ugly thing.  This is 
the lesson that Barbara Ehrenreich learns from the series of low-wage jobs 
that she works and then describes in all their bitter detail in her new 
book, Nickel and Dimed.  Pious chatter about "free agents" and "empowered 
workers" may illuminate the covers of Fast Company and Business 2.0, but 
what strikes one most forcefully about the world of waitresses, maids, and 
Wal-Mart workers that Ehrenreich enters is the overwhelming power of 
management, the intimidating array of advantages it holds in its endless war 
on wages.  This is a place where even jobs like housecleaning have been 
Taylorized to extract maximum output from workers ("You know, all this was 
figured out with a stopwatch," Ehrenreich is told by a proud manager at a 
maid service), where omnipresent personality and drug tests screen out those 
of assertive nature, where even the lowliest of employees are overseen by 
professional-grade hierarchs who crack the whip without remorse or relent, 
where workers are cautioned against "stealing time" from their employer by 
thinking about anything other than their immediate task, and where every bit 
of legal, moral, psychological, and anthropological guile available to 
advanced civilization is deployed to prevent the problem of pay from ever 
impeding the upward curve of profitability.  This is the real story of life 
under markets.

But the point where all the "New Economy" glory and promise really start to 
suck, where all the vaunted choice and empowerment of free markets are 
revealed as so many creaking stage devices, is when Ehrenreich takes on the 
shiniest of all the Nineties myths-productivity.  With the country as close 
to full employment as it has ever been in 1999 and 2000, wages did not 
increase as much as standard economic theory held they ought.  Among the 
devout this was cause for great rejoicing: Through a titanic national effort 
we had detached productivity from wages, handing the gains over to owners 
and shareholders instead.  But this was less a "choice" that Americans 
consciously made than it was, as Ehrenreich makes undeniably evident, the 
simple triumph of the nation's managers, always encouraging employees to 
think of themselves as stakeholders or team members even as they 
unilaterally dictate every aspect of the work experience.

The social panorama that Ehrenreich describes should stand as an eternal 
shrine to the god that sucked: Slum housing that is only affordable if 
workers take on two jobs at once; exhausted maids eating packages of hot-dog 
buns for their meals; women in their twenties so enfeebled by this regimen 
that they can no longer lift the vacuum cleaners that the maid service 
demands they carry about on their backs; purse searches, drug tests, 
personality tests, corporate pep rallies.  Were we not so determined to 
worship the market and its boogie-boarding billionaires, Ehrenreich 
suggests, we might even view their desperate, spent employees as 
philanthropists of a sort, giving selflessly of their well-being so that the 
comfortable might live even more comfortably.  "They neglect their own 
children so that the children of others will be cared for," she writes; 
"they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and 
perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock 
prices high."

These are the fruits of thirty years of culture war.  Hell-bent to get 
government off our backs, you installed a tyrant infinitely better equipped 
to suck the joy out of life.  Cuckoo to get God back in the schools, you 
enshrined a god of unappeasable malice.  Raging against the snobs, you 
enthroned a rum bunch of two-fisted boodlers, upper-class twits, and 
hang-em-high moralists.  Ain't irony grand.

******************************************************************

You can make a fresh start with your final breath.

- the Keener's Manual



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