Intellectual Border Wars: Two Reviews

A couple of more reviews, of similarly-themed books, for your perusal. The second one will be returned late to the library tomorrow. Not only am I providing this public service free of charge to you, gentle readers, I'm actually paying out-of-pocket for the privilege. There's commitment, huh? As always, email me at mpbookfreak@hotmail.com with any comments, and come see me at the Freret Market on Saturday, September 5th, if you're in New Orleans.

Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People
by Jon Jeter
W.W. Norton and Company, 2009

Life, Inc.: How The World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Random House, 2009

When NAFTA was passed in 1993 (with Vice President Al Gore casting the deciding vote) (thanks, Al) (I still don't regret voting for Nader), the dot com boom may have insulated the U.S. economy from the worst of the predicted results for a few years. Still, despite the mainstream media's annointment of Ross Perot as the official voice of the opposition, commentators, activists and pundits from across the ideological spectrum warned of the disasters to come. Meanwhile, the Zapatista Army took matters into their own hands on January 1, 1994, launching military assaults against the Mexican army in their home state of Chiapas as the first salvo of a campaign that continues to inspire. In November of 1999, an international grassroots alliance took the fight to the Masters of the Universe, disrupting the WTO meeting in Seattle and dealing it a public blow from it has arguably never recovered (by which I don't claim that they have been rendered ineffective, just that they are much less public about their activities).

Unfortunately, as deindustrialization and the outsourcing of work has continued apace, the intellectual component of the opposition has been largely outsourced as well. While the home of Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, Thoreau, Ida Tarbell, Izzy Stone and George Seldes has been hammered by the tsunami of corporate globalization, I would argue that the most rigorous, lively and readable analyses have come from the likes of Kalle Lasn (Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America, 1999), Joel Bakan (The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, 2004), and Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 2007). What is the common thread? That's right, they're all.... Canadian.

But Americans can take heart in the publication of two recent books that take on corporate globalization without any of the, shall we say, baggage of works by the likes of Lou Dobbs or Pat Buchanan. Both complement each other well, as John Jeter's approach is more journalistic muckraker, his comprehensive reporting allowing the most blatant victims of corporate globalization their say. Douglas Rushkoff is more cerebral and scholarly, offering a centuries-spanning big picture context for our current predicament.

Jon Jeter’s Flat Broke is a powerful indictment of the gospel of free-market globalization fundamentalism, written by an unlikely source. Jeter was a the former Washington Post bureau chief for southern Africa (1999-2003) and South America (2003-2004), and this passionate jeremiad draws heavily from reporting in South Africa and Zambia, Brazil and Argentina, Chicago and Washington, D.C., as the lives and daily struggles of cab drivers, prostitutes and vegetable peddlers vividly illustrate the homicidal dynamics of increasingly abstract financial machinations beyond the control of most individuals and even governments, including those of long-established “democracies.”

Jeter’s perceptions and analysis are worlds away from the established orthodoxy of Thomas Friedman’s New York Times and Fareed Zakaria’s Newsweek, whose confidence in neoliberal globalization’s historical inevitability rival Lenin’s faith in “scientific socialism.” He sees once-functioning economies and societies like Argentina’s, with historically high rates of public infrastructure investment, domestic manufacturing, literacy, employment, union membership and relative social mobility, devastated in a very short time by irrational adherence to the mantra of the International Monetary Fund: the slashing of public investment, the acquisition of enormous national debt, privatization of common resources, the shrinking of manufacturing and agricultural sectors to a handful of exportable commodities. The reader then sees the human devastation through Jeter’s sensitive and passionate reporting, as social pathologies appear in short order and play themselves out in the lives of individuals, couples and families.

Parallels are drawn between these international examples and the deindustrialized American city, with the complicity of corporate-friendly African-American political leaders, their rise facilitated by the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, coming under particular scrutiny. Unfortunately, New Orleans is not part of Jeter’s focus (I would recommend Naomi Klein’s aforementioned Shock Doctrine for an analysis of post-Katrina shenanigans in a global context), but the nation’s capital and President Obama’s most recent hometown are, with numerous examples of the co-optation of the power structure for the benefit of the few. This is a remarkable work, complementing recent works like Shock Doctrine and John Perkins’ insider expose’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Jeter’s unique strength is a Studs Terkel-like empathy with his subjects, combined with an Izzy Stonesque doggedness and eye for the numbers and statistics that illustrate their plight.

Douglas Rushkoff's Life Inc. is an intellectual feast, providing a scope and context for the development of the corporation and its unprecedented power and influence that rivals Bakan's earlier work. Like that commentator and many others, including Thom Hartmann, Rushkoff identifies the fraudulent 1886 Supreme Court decision that established "corporate personhood" and 14th Amendment (the one that guarantees Constitutional rights to former slaves) as a crucial watershed. However, he sees that designation as merely building on economic and political dynamics stretching back to the Renaissance, as aristocrats married their political leverage to a merchant class whose global reach and ambitions was rendering landlocked nobles and their authority increasingly irrelevant.

The 20th century sees the introduction of modern psychology and sophisticated propoganda techniques, which gradually make their way into the new disciplines of marketing and public relations, all at the beck and call of the corporations whose reach becomes ever more insidious. Rushkoff's discussion of local vs. centralized currency, historically and modern-day, is also utterly fascinating, connecting a lot of dots for those of us, like myself, without a deep understanding of such issues.

I must admit to one peeve about Rushkoff's style, however. He has a tendency to overgeneralize about classes of people and the level of their complicity and entanglement in the corporatist system. In just one of many, many examples, Rushkoff discusses the enormous complexity of the interlocking corporate interests controlling so much of energy, agriculture, health care and governmental policies and the quixotic efforts to combat and control them: "Those who do get the full picture--intellectuals reading all about it in The New York Review of Books as they sun with their Dalton-educated teens on the beaches of East Hampton--can't help but shrug. The problem is just too big," (p. 212). While John Jeter gives his reader portraits of working-class people from South America and Africa who "get it," Rushkoff appears at times tone-deaf to the nuances of both acceptance of and opposition to the corporatism he so brilliantly analyzes historically. Very few can live a life of pure rejection of the corporate system, but I have known at least dozens, if not hundreds, in the communities I've lived in as an adult(New Orleans, Shreveport, Portland, small-town New Hampshire and Vermont), who choose their battles and live the parts of their lives that they can without the mediation of corporate entities. And I would argue that New Orleans has as large a concentration of people trying to do just that as anywhere, motivated by a kind of existential stubbornness (I hereby declare a personal moratorium on the word "resilience") I am in absolute awe of.

Rushkoff's overgeneralization tendencies are doubly disconcerting when a search of his personal webiste reveals his participation with the MaybeLogic Academy, a project of the late novelist and quantum philosopher Robert Anton Wilson, who was hypervigilant about rooting out such lazy thinking. However, despite my obvious preoccupation with the matter, Life Inc. is a true tour de force of original analysis and synthesis.

Better yet, we're back, baby! Come on, Lou Dobbs and Stephen Colbert, let's show these books some love. USA! USA! USA! USA!