Below is a link to a Moyer's interview with David Simon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qulcqNMHVic&feature=related
Geeze, it's like this was going on and since I never had cable, of course I never saw it.
I read most of Eric Beck's essay. It's actually pretty good, why silly(?). It's long but at about the right level of detail. Did you get paid--I hope? It's only real draw back is an advanced POV, and written for a well read crowd who already knows the basic score. It is also a criticism of criticism, in the sense of criticizing several postmodern critics, particularly the tendency to examine a postmodern subjectivity produced by the ideology and institutional changes of neoliberalism. Since my basic consciousness formation pre-dates postmodernity in the old Keyensian era, I was always a little suspicious of whether those changes of consciousness were `real' or not.
Here is the relevant passage from EB's essay, which I will go into in a different way below:
``...the end of welfare as we know it" has not meant a dramatic decrease in money spent on social programs but rather their reorganization into different programs that can more tightly monitor and modify recipients' behavior: workfare programs, family and parenting classes, smoking cessation and diet counseling, drug testing, and the like. [v] In this ironic way, Keynesian social guarantees, which are often held out as the social form that should be resurrected, have acted as a technique for implementing neoliberalism's axioms...''
http://www.rhizomes.net/issue19/beck.html
I am not sure if Simon were talking in D&G terms anybody would know what he was saying. It was a good essay, but it was for a literary crowd. The rag was called zhizomes, right, and not The Daily Worker.
Simon got to figure out these relationships through his journalism. I got to similar view through a social service job, first as a hopeful reformer, then as just a job that deteriorated into a delivery gatekeeper, i.e. a cop. In other words, I was co-opted from doing service to denying service or selecting service based on insurance coverage.
There is a problem with using the street crime world as the central metaphor. The problem is that it tends to obscure the fundamental criminality (corruption of purpose) of institutional relationships with capital production systems. You get to see this by working within such a system.
Plenty of people on the list understand how this corruption works in education where the purpose was supposed to produce informed citizens who could make decisions in their interest and keep public and private institutions aimed at producing a better life for all. That is not what is going on---obviously. Less well known, I susepct is a related system of corrupted ideals and concommitant oppressions that pervades all institutions of the society.
I think Simon begins to see this as a journalist with the cops, the courts, the prisons, city hall and the media. I have to assume he does. I watched one episode, I think the first of the third season.
Anybody know links to more full episodes please post.
If there was such a thing as journalism of healthcare Simon would have seen my world. Michael Moore sort of gets it in Sicko, as far as I can tell, but even he doesn't quite dig out the depth of the shit and its systematic perversion through regulation and legislation that creates this bond between government and business to make profit from those who are not producing with their labor--making them `useful' members of society. How to milk the sick and dying. How to milk the disabled and the old. Then there is the whole business end of death and the dead who don't die cheap.
In my former world, the basic scheme is to use what's left of the welfare state and safety net as a voucher system to channel consumer purchasing in industries like pharma, DME, hospitals, and medical services. The primary target for benefit is the economic system and has little to do with the people named as beneficiaries. The latter are simply the voucher carrying medium. I know this isn't news, but the details of how this is done is still pretty astonishing to watch and terrible to work at.
Here is an example. I always thought that wheelchair manufacturers paid close attention to what disabled users wanted and needed. So I asked myself why on earth are they building this shit? Then I figured it out. The production system is not geared to the disabled customer need. The marketing, sales, production, and designs are aimed at the professional rehab consumer needs, i.e. physical and occupational threapists, teachers, social workers, the bourgeois professional service class---none of whom are disabled. The market is producing for them, because they are the `real' buyers, i.e. they make the selections and write the purchase order spec. The disabled voucher carrier, techs like me, even the design engineers in the production system are irrelevant. And here is the fun part. This professional service market is subject to its own fads, whimsy, trivia, and generally a complete ignorance of the mechanical and disabled world. Color and `style' are more talked about than range, speed, and reliability. Not everybody is a complete airhead idiot---i.e. the neoliberal subjective state. But those who are not, are generally frustrated because they have to live with this bullshit on their mind. At least that's a step up from having to wear-run the shit all day.
This production system is closely tied to the legal-regulatory structure of Medicare-Medicaid system of fee schedules. The manufacturers produce and artificially create lowest common denomenator equip priced at the fee schedules tiers. The effect is to reproduce the economic class war system of increasing spreads between have and have not, with ever greater depredations of the lower orders and conversely an ever greater quality of life accumulation for the upper orders.
CG