"One Market Under God, and Heaven Help Us All"

[Carl Remick]

[From the current NY Observer.]

One Market Under God, and Heaven Help Us All

By Nicholas von Hoffman

"'Bullshit,'" writes Thomas Frank, "certainly appeared in my own 
conversation that day when I flipped through my first book of management 
theory—Tom Peters' 800-page 1992 opus, Liberation Management. Peters' zanier 
1997 book, The Circle of Innovation, is bullshit on wheels. 'Bullshit' was 
also my response when I sat amongst an audience of hundreds of paying 
businessmen and heard my first 'futurist' tell how Hegel, whom he had 
evidently confused with Francis Fukuyama, so long ago predicted liberal 
democracy's victory over fascism and communism; describe the rich personal 
friendship of John Locke and Adam Smith; and pronounce on the complete and 
laughable irrelevance of Newtonian physics now that all of Einstein's 
theories were 'laws.' Anybody who has had any experience with the management 
theory industry can tell similar stories: of quotes and dates wildly 
misplaced, of an alarming and misinformed credulity about science, of 
anecdotes that prove nothing, of patently wrong syllogisms, of meaningless 
diagrams and homemade master narratives."

The passage just quoted is from One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, 
Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy, a new Doubleday book 
that should be arriving in the bookstores in October. It will be interesting 
to see what happens to Thomas Frank, the author. Will he and his book simply 
not get reviewed in The New York Times and elsewhere, or will he be covered 
with contumely, lava'd over with scorn as ice cream in a sundae is blanketed 
in chocolate sauce? Thomas Frank is a rare voice asking what the hell is 
going on in America: How comes it that, in the matter of a couple of 
decades, 10 percent of the population own 70 percent of everything of value 
and are using the money power to do whatever they want whenever they want, 
and it's supposed to be a new and higher form of democracy.

The man has a refined bullshit detector, plus he has been standing near the 
rear ends of our best paid propagandists. Close in and knee-deep in it, Mr. 
Frank has made his determined way through lakes of sludge to ridicule, 
shred, mock and expose the latter-day propagandists of business globalism, 
the pump-and-jump artists and the whorish hacks preaching New Age economics 
and New Order authoritarianism—James J. Cramer, the Motley Fool, Joseph 
Nocera, James K. Glassman, Lawrence Kudlow, Peter Lynch, the aforesaid Tom 
Peters, Lester Thurow, Thomas Friedman and not a few more. The commies used 
to call such writers the "running dogs of capitalist imperialism." This form 
of invective has gone out of style, but I like the sound of the words, if 
only because I haven't heard them in a while. Running dogs have teeth, of 
course, so the question is will they choose to ignore Mr. Frank, treat him 
as a crank unworthy of notice, or subject him to a fang attack? The one 
thing they will not do, you may be sure, is answer the arguments and 
observations in this book.

If others have accepted without question the announcements that the 
political and social arrangements of the nation have been altered by the 
onward march of technology, as it has been deployed by venture capitalists, 
Mr. Frank detected the hoax which would have us believe that billionaire and 
busboy are now the same; that, though the rich get richer and the rest do 
not, all are getting more equal and more democratic, living the high-tech 
life on the level playing field. Hence, he writes that "the 'New Economy' 
was a narrative of class warfare as much as anything else: Wherever its 
dynamic new logic touched down old money quaked and faltered; the markets of 
inherited wealth were superseded by more extreme tastes; the hip was 
separated from the square, the opera-going CEOs gave way to those who wore 
goatees and fancied the phatter rhymes of the street. The scions of ancient 
banking families finding their smug selves wiped out by the New Jack trading 
of a working-class kid; the arrogant stockbrokers of old being humiliated by 
the new billions of the online day-traders; the public school boys with 
their regimental ties being bought out by the guys in jeans and T-shirts; 
the white men of the world getting their asses kicked by the women, the 
Asians, the Africans, the Hispanics; the buttondown whip-cracking bosses 
getting fired by the corporate 'change agents'; the self-assured network 
figures reduced to tears by the Vox Populi of the Web."

It is claimed in 10,000 corporate TV ads every day that "One Market Under 
God"— liberating, fulfilling, leveling, sweeping away pretension, infusing 
in us a perfect efficiency—has replaced the flawed principles of the 
earlier, less successful formulations of 1789. The new political economy of 
the United States, as corporate America repeats via every known medium, is 
market populism.

But Mr. Frank writes that "market populism ... is a fraud. Tom Friedman's 
formula, 'one dollar, one vote,' is not the same thing as universal 
suffrage." He can't swallow it "when the richest people ever in history tell 
us they are 'listening' to us, that theirs are 'interactive' fortunes or 
that they have unusual tastes and work particularly hard. Markets may look 
like democracy, in that we are all involved in their making, but they are 
fundamentally not democratic. We did not vote for Bill Gates … "

Mr. Frank has put his hand on what might be called a silent coup d'etat, 
carried out in full view via advertising, on the same scale that Hitler and 
Mao used to inculcate the truths of their new world orders. The landscape of 
our minds is being rearranged by incessant fusillades of new-era propaganda 
on a scale never seen in a non-totalitarian society. The Web, brought to you 
by Cisco Systems, will make you free and make you equal and make you feel 
like you're rich.

Part of Mr. Frank's thesis is that our society is under attack by propaganda 
neutron bombs. When the firing stops, the real estate will be in place, not 
a brick disturbed, the laws will be the same, but our heads will have been 
so changed that we will now believe that the business executives are the 
"revolutionaries," fighting "the elites" in the struggle for freedom, 
meaning a society in which markets, emancipated from every form of control 
(except manipulation by the brokers) decide everything. In the CEO-cracy 
aborning, a population taught to believe that all blessings flow from the 
board rooms will assist in the dismantling of public power and hence in its 
own neutering.

In the personal realm, most of us have already had our powers reduced to a 
near nullity. In the interactive age, we were placed on hold 15 years ago, 
and we're still waiting. We are on a universal automated telephone menu, the 
electronic circle ever returning to the announcement that tells us, "To hear 
these options again, press star, press pound, press any old goddamn number 
you want—and you'll still get a recorded horselaugh."

It is odd that so many of us are so upset about the possibility that our 
guns might be made illegal. We must have them to defend ourselves, although 
virtually none of us will ever be in a threatening situation which can be 
saved by firearms. We need weapons, all right, but not ones that fire 
bullets. We have no market power, we have no unions, we have no candidates. 
Politically, we have been de-sexed. We're sterile, impotent—and most of us, 
it seems, are too dumb, too greedy, too silly or too bedazzled to notice.

But Thomas Frank knows, and he ends his book with an eloquent paragraph 
which says that which begs to be said: The so-called New Economy has brought 
about "the destruction of the social contract of mid-century, the 
middle-class republic that our ancestors spent decades building. We burnt it 
up in one great bonfire in order to toast a few marshmallows. Millions found 
themselves trapped in casual jobs with no benefits, but our shares ... did 
OK. We caught the Qualcomm wave and acquiesced as the last of the social 
safety nets were removed. A good education for our kids ascended out of our 
reach, but our position in Cisco paid off; our neighborhoods collapsed and 
our industries decamped and our neighbors were rounded up for a lifetime in 
Joliet, but we had an amply funded 401(k) to show for it ... we surrendered 
any control over our own future ... we frittered away what little workplace 
power we had managed to achieve; convinced that the Internet 'changed 
everything' we eased ourselves into a state of induced forgetfulness; for 
the sake of 'democracy' we signed away some of our most basic rights as 
citizens."

[end]

Carl





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