-Caveat Lector-
Excellent post!!! Old money, inherited wealth, and upper class Industrialists, as
well as the new elite of Technocrats have never had it so good. AND to top it off now
they have a man like O'neil in Treasury who wants that no businesses should pay tax
and the common people should be made to work and be more willing to foot the bill to
keep it nice for the new "fat cats" and get nothing for all the money they are forced
to give to the government in order to enforce the police state which buries them
further into poverty and disdain.
On Fri, 06 July 2001, "Nurev Ind." wrote:
>
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> 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 shut down the Hollywood studios or repealed rock 'n' roll.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.
>
> <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
> ==========
> CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
> screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are
> sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis-
> directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with
> major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
> That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
> always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
> credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
>
> Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
> ========================================================================
> Archives Available at:
> http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
> <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
>
> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
> <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
> ========================================================================
> To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
> SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
> SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> Om
"Welcome to the desert of the real." Morpheus, in The Matrix
"My God it's full of stars!" Dave Bowman, in 2001: A Space
Odyssey
Find the best deals on the web at AltaVista Shopping!
http://www.shopping.altavista.com
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
