``This is clearly a considerable marginalization, so I’m going to quit.'' Doug
``...as others have said, let us know where to send the donations to get you up and running in another venue.'' Sean Andrews
Or write a few more books. Mark Bennet
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Remarkably shitty news. If it's any solice, I quit every damned job I ever had, with no back plan.
Get yourself a back up plan to make you feel better. I say open a paypal account to collect funds for a new book. What's another fifty bucks on an already crashing credit card?
I am trying to find the silver lining... It frees you up to write a remake of C.Wright Mills Power Elite---a big and intimdating project.
I'd been thinking about it, looking forward to that project. I got Mills' book on my desk a couple of days ago, flipping through it. It must have taken a lot of research to put it together. My other impression was that book definitely changed me politically. And, Henwood's Wall Street, left my head spinning with how much worse the new order was.
``In their attempts to neutralize or to turn to their own use the articulate public, the opinion-makers try to make it a relay network for their views. If opinion-makers have so much power that they can act directly and openly upon the primary publics, they may become authoritative; but, if they do not have such power and hence have to operate indirectly and without visibility, they will assume the stance of manipulators.'' (316p)
I just picked a page, I had a bookmark in. This pretty much captures what's going on all over the country with the intense corporate effort to buy the elections in different forms. The only question is which corporations are buying which elections. See NPR on Arizona's Immigration Law for details.
I was trying to think out what makes our power elite so different from Mills' time. You hint at it: the transaction has replaced the stewartship model.
There is a theoretical level above that, and it gets to the ideological, historical and technological development of neoliberalism. There's some pretty hefty social theory work to get at between neo-classical economics, high speed transport, communication nets, and the speed with which money, banks, and the infrastructure of business operates. This I think helps explain in a material way, why the transaction model took over. Well, in a dialectic between the several components---just in time inventories are impossible without a vast internet-computer infrastructure... In the wheelchair industry the cycle time between concept and mass production has reduced to less than a year, along the auto-industry model. High speed supply chains in China complete the picture.
I haven't read Keynes and only got a few pages into Hayek. I also don't know enough about the power elite ideological make-up of Mills' time. So all of this is guessing.
In many ways, the WWII Big Picture style of Eisenhower's D-Day was the big hierarchical planning model of US industry and business during the period. It set the technological-ideological foundations for global empire.
It seems to me that the stewartship generations might have had a pretty large wing of Keynesians, semi-merged with Hayek. Both thought they were saving Kapital. They thought they were saving democracy and busines in a world that threatened both.
I only got a small glimpse of this mind set from my uncle who was an artillery capitain during the war and after slowly rose to became a VP at Prudential. He also managed the division that processed MediCal claims toward the end of his career. Until his brain went to jelly, he never lost sight of the Big Picture of US empire.
We are not in that world at all anymore. It's that previous form of liberalism that is being crushed and eaten by the neoliberal order. We're in a previous nightmare, the Gilded Age of barons who raped, pillaged, and burned their way west. Again, I think there are geography like parallels with the telegraph, rail and ship transport, newspapers, and organization systems that make the whole thing work. Louis Proycet posted a movie, Night Mail, (see Pen-l) that shows how this system worked.
What I am thinking is that the older version required a longer term view as part of its ideological and technological make up. There was also a punishment loop that you could go broke and lose everything if you made a mistake. Now that seems to be gone.
At the writing level, there are some style issues. You're pretty focused on empirical methods and a journalist approach. Mills was working more at a social theory level. I am pretty sure he had plenty of research study to back him up, but didn't use it for his writing. He wrote about what he found, not what he found.
Mills also probably had much more interesting people to study. Paul Krugman posted something to the effect that most people don't know the `market' is made up of 20-somethings inventing sick and twisted ways to make cash in a hurry--supervised by 30-somethings. That doesn't sound like a very interesting group. And on top of them are the old fucks like Clinton and George W---an even greater void to explore.
The real grown ups like my uncle seemed to have gone to oblivion without a trace. If I take my uncle as a representative wannabe old style western branch of the Brauhman class, he was pretty enjoyable to be around and talk with, even if we were straight up enemies on just about every issue of war and peace. He didn't support my draft resistance, but he understood it. He thought Vietnam was a mistake from his military mind set. I think he understood that atrocities corrupt a military in a deep way, because he had seen it operate first hand. I think of WWII as probably an atrocity story, yet to be told. The US military was beginning disintegration---my uncle, stepfather, and close old painter friend hinted at it, but they never got down to details. You can get some hint by reading Heller, Vonnegut, Camus and most especially Gramham Green. These were sick puppies getting sicker by the month.
Let's not forget the ultimate style for WWII was cinema noir. I don't think it was an accident that LA and SF were centers for the Pacific Theater, and the hard-boiled crime novel and grade B movie. Army and Navy guys fucked by the war sat in run down theaters watching the shit in black and white. They then went out to some sentimental big band production to look for pay girls for romance before the USN sent them back---drinking like fish. Pretty fucking grim. I was a kid in one of these romances and it was pretty damned grim even from a kid pov. I see now, my parents were fucked up by depression and war and really didn't ever get over it. There was no heroism, only dark despair and struggle. They were all alcoholics and misfits for example.
There were a lot of contradictions within that older stewartship mind set. The 60s ran intuitative campaigns to push nearly every one of their buttons from race to war to work habits to the bill of rights to human rights.
I think about my uncle often. He would do the trigonometry to blow you to pieces, but he wasn't going to fuck with you. He ulitmate believed in life, not death. He was a good man with fucked up ideas, not a fucked up man with bad ideas. Somewhere in there is the story.
Best of luck and hope. Post the PayPal for The New Power Elite. I'll send some credit card amount, spending it down to homelessness where truck living takes hold.
Chuck