The Bullshit Economy

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Village Voice Book Supplement, September 2000

THE BULLSHIT ECONOMY
BY MIKE DAVIS

Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street From Wall Street
By Jeff Gates
Perseus, 400 pp., $25

One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of
Economic Democracy
By Thomas Frank
Doubleday, 352 pp., $26

It has been more than a generation since I trudged through the piney woods
of East Texas in search of the Last True Populist. I had heard Archer
Fullingim speak in Austin. He was already a Texas legend: a fearless
six-foot-five country editor who denounced the Klan, the Birchers, and the
Big Rich from an ink-stained pulpit in the mysterious Big Thicket. At a
time (1967) when Vietnam and Black Power were turning most of my activist
friends toward the hard Left, I clung to the romance of a homespun
radicalism whose soul was the Jeffersonian equality of property and
opportunity. Fullingim seemed its living incarnation. When others quoted
Che or Mao, I responded with peppery excerpts from the Kountze News
(circulation 2000).

After bumping into trees and armadillos for an hour or so, I finally found
his house. Fullingim was on the porch, carving a gourd in the moonlight. He
listened patiently while I ranted about economic populism and participatory
democracy. Then he leaned his craggy, bespectacled face close to mine and
quietly said: "Son, with all respect, you are the dumbest little pissant I
have met in years. This country, in case you didn't realize it, is the
property of the Fortune 500 and their stooges in both political parties.
Populism died when my Pappy was still eating mule farts on his cotton
patch. Open your goddamn eyes." He folded his jackknife, winked wickedly,
and said good night. I went back to Austin and started reading Marx.

I wonder what ole Arch would make of the wacky proposals for reviving
populism in Jeff Gates's Democracy at Risk. Gates advertises himself as a
chimera: an implausible combination of Beltway insider (former counsel to
the U.S. Senate Finance Committee), New Age entrepreneur (investment banker
and founder of the Gates Group), and egalitarian firebrand. From his
purchase in these alternate realities, he perceives (to torture Dickens)
that "things are getting both better and better and worse and worse." If
the New Economy is a "sumptuous heaven for some," it is "a living hell for
many."

On the infernal side of the ledger, Gates carpet bombs the reader with
statistics about exponentialized inequality that would have startled even
the authors of The Communist Manifesto. In the late 1990s, for example,
while Americans were otherwise diverted by the stains on Monica Lewinsky's
dress, the country's 400 richest families increased their net worth by
almost a billion dollars apiece while the pie slice of the bottom 40
percent of the population plummeted 80 percent. African Americans, who in
1865 owned .5 percent of the American Dream, managed to increase that
share, after 125 years of further toil and struggle, to a meager 1 percent
by the inauguration of Bill Clinton. Globally, the Wealth Decade of the
1990s translated into negative income trends for 80 African and Latin
American countries, while 200 masters of the universe, led by Bill Gates
and the sultan of Brunei, amassed personal fortunes equivalent to the total
income of the world's 2.5 billion poorest people.

Silicon-chip capitalism, it seems, is creating a world ominously like the
split-level society of playboys and drones depicted in Fritz Lang's
Metropolis. What is to be done? Prolétaires aux armes? Too old-fashioned.
Quoting from Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Huey Long, Alvin Toffler, and "His
Holiness the Dalai Lama," Gates advises readers that free enterprise,
despite its sins, is the only game in town. "There is magic in capitalism,"
but it needs the democratic leaven of a "populist people-first spirit." The
point is not to expropriate the expropriators but to "reconfigure the
feedback loops."

In excruciating prose that should have condemned his editor to a firing
squad, Gates explains that "the goal here is not to prioritize an agenda in
some top-down fashion but to 'passion-ize' it-by empowering those who are
enthusiastic about making change work from the bottom up. . . . That means
less top-down 'dominator' democracy and more bottom-up
'partnership-ocracy.' " He wants to share the wealth ("peoplize property
patterns") by broadly distributing equity to the have-nots ("quantum
populism"). His eclectic-and unfortunate-models for an "ownerized economy"
include strife-torn United Airlines (fractionally owned by its pilots), the
Green Bay Packers (a municipal franchise), the Body Shop (founded by
exemplary "populist" Anita Roddick), and Visa International (owned by
22,000 member banks).

Gates, bless his soul, seems utterly innocent of distinctions between
atomized share ownership (as when employees eat their bosses' debts through
an Employee Stock Option Plan) and substantive corporate control (as in the
power to close a plant or pollute a watershed). Millions of stockholder
claims hardly aggregate to economic democracy. The Russians, after all,
were handed their economy in tiny shares after 1989 with predictably
populist results. But Gates's naïveté about corporate sociology is
overshadowed by his truly hallucinatory proposals for traversing "the path
from here to there."

He has two big, Forest Gump-like ideas. First he wants to induce "a
collective shift in our cultural DNA by engaging worldwide youth in a
project I call Viewpoint 2000." A "Culture Corps" of wonky American
teenagers would go to Kosovo, Bolivia, and Chad to help local kids build
their own telescopes. One look at the rings of Saturn and a child with a
stomach growling from hunger would "instantly become a twenty-first-century
global citizen." (Come again?)

The second panacea is even zanier. In homage to the daddy of his former
Washington patron, Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, Gates wants to revive
Huey Long's bombastic platform from the Depression years. Long had promised
that if elected president in 1936 he would appoint a commission, chaired by
John D. Rockefeller, to devise a capital levy that would make "Every Man a
King." Gates thinks Warren Buffet, aided by Bill Gates, Ted Turner, and
George Soros, would make a latter-day dream team ("Share the Wealth 2000")
to figure out how to "peoplize ownership" of corporate America and enthrone
the rest of us as democratic capitalists.

The Kingfish, of course, was famously spoofing folks when he proposed to
put the robber barons in charge of giving away their own wealth. In its
time it caused a lot of chuckles in the bayous, but Gates, sadly, doesn't
get the joke. Neither, apparently, does Ralph Nader, who has fulsomely
endorsed Democracy at Risk and its wish-upon-a-star nostrums for reforming
greed.

Thomas Frank, on the other hand, sees dark Hegelian humor at work in the
New Economy's transmogrification of billionaires into anti-elitist culture
heroes. The killing joke is that Wall Street, not the Big Thicket, is now
the heartland of populism.

"Wherever one looked in the Nineties," he writes in One Market Under God,
"entrepreneurs were occupying the ideological space once filled by the
noble sons of toil." Popular culture is saturated with images of the bull
market as a populist millennium: "a kind of permanent social revolution in
which daring entrepreneurs were endlessly toppling fatcats and picking off
the millions of the lazy rich kids."

To believe the business press, there had not been such sheer Jeffersonian
opportunity since the California Gold Rush. Only idiots wouldn't pick up a
software nugget or two, even if simply to use as "fuck-you money" to get a
boss off their backs.

Moreover, as the dotcom generation has roared into the boardroom over the
yuppie corpses in Brooks Brothers suits, they have brazenly kept their Easy
Rider lifestyles. Frank shows how the rebellious '60s and the greedy '80s
have fused in the monstrous, populist '90s. It is now almost impossible to
distinguish the counterculture from the power elite. (Look no further than
the chimerical Jeff Gates.) Latter-day hippies get high on NASDAQ, buy up
whole blocks of the Haight, and evict the geriatric survivors of Flower
Power. Once they would have been denounced as capitalist pigs. Now they get
fawning profiles in Wired.

Frank-the founder of that pugnacious little review The Baffler-is a pit
bull when he bites into the ankle of this new bourgeoisie.

"This plutocracy was cool! They were flooding into bohemian neighborhoods
like San Francisco's Mission District, chatting with the guys in the band
and working on their poetry in Starbucks; they were going it alone with
their millions and their out-of-wedlock child; they were abjuring stodgy
ties and suits for 24/7 casual; they were leaping on their trampolines,
typing out a few last lines on the laptops before heading off to go
paragliding, riding their bicycles to work, listening to Steppenwolf while
they traded, drinking beer in the office, moshing at the Motley Crue show,
startling the board members with their streetwise remarks, roaring down the
freeway in their Lamborghinis, snowboarding in Crested, racing their
jetskis by the platform at Cannes and splashing all the uptight French
people."

But One Market Under God is not all Menckenesque spleen. Frank provides a
useful genealogy of today's "market populism," tracing its roots to the
short-lived People's Capitalism of the 1920s and especially John J.
Raskob's notorious mutual fund utopia of 1929 ("Everybody Ought to Be
Rich"). He debunks the overblown legends of Peter Lynch and Warren Buffet,
and profiles the snake-oil salesmen-Joseph Nocera, George Gilder, Jonathan
Hoenig, Tom Peters, Charles Handy, and so on-who have scripted the Frank
Capra-like mythologies of the current "People's Market" and "People's
Boom." For those of us who are still dumb heathens, unanointed in the
ecstatic religion of instant and infinitely increasing wealth, Frank is a
wry and reliable guide, even if he has just begun to sound the sinister
depths of the current alloy of predatory capitalism, youth culture, and
populist demagoguery.

(Mike Davis is the author of Ecology of Fear and Magical Urbanism: Latinos
Reinvent the U.S. Big City)


Full review at: http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/169/davis.shtml

Louis Proyect

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