[…see also the September 15, 2013 The Waking Up Radio Show, a partial transcript of which is located at: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided… under ‘September 15’.]
“Unpacking Robert Reich’s Baggage”
We have to pay attention to how they use words to con and control and claim the earth for themselves… and we really have to get our own lexicon going…
This past Friday (September 13, 2013) the radio program Democracy Now! devoted the entire show to interviewing Robert Reich, providing us with a good opportunity to unpack and examine some key economic and political ‘propaganda for the class system’. And Reich has given us a fresh illustration of an old tactic that maybe we should call “mulberry bush” because… for an economist, there to talk about ‘the economy’… and promote a film about ‘the economy’… he said remarkably little about ‘the economy’.
But before beginning, I have to say, that I find Amy Goodman a mystery. I can’t decide whether she’s made her limited pact with the devil… or with us… either way, her program often provides both good information and lots of propaganda. And as we’ll see, she may have also invented a version of this “mulberry bush” propaganda tactic… that we could call “coitus flirtatious”… i.e. pretending to dance with truth while in fact undermining it.
Could it be that others write the words she speaks and she lacks a moral compass? For instance just now I heard a left pundit use the phrase “inter-communal violence”… now that’s such blatant propaganda it was startling to hear her say it, but she gave no sign that she recognized its significance.
I remember when I was hawking books a woman who I realized, by the end of our encounter, had presented many ‘tells’ of being an intelligencer… asked me if I would consider being interviewed in a video she was calling “Extinction”… and my reaction was almost visceral: “I’d never be part of something with that name,” I told her. “I believe we’re being prepared to accept a very dark future (for instance I was very disappointed in Denzel for participating in that apocalyptic film) – and I believe the opposite is true… that our future will be bright… because rooted in the soil of the free gifts expressed… by every single one of us.”
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…the “‘nation-state’ as frame” con… (pt. 1)
In “You Know How I Know 'Localization' or 'Democratic Economics' Is A Con?” we said that there were some key things to look for in the words of pundits in order to see the propaganda – whether intentional or not is another issue – in defense of the class system:
• The statist ‘we’: the corporate ‘we’… talking about ‘the state’ but using the word ‘we’;
• Magical thinking: ‘power’ as an organized actor is never seriously credited… or sometimes even admitted into the calculation of the so-called ‘solution’ being proposed;
• Coerced work, of course, is never questioned;
• ‘Class’ is assumed as inevitable;
• ‘The economy’ must be protected at all costs.
Robert Reich displayed all of these. But one of the most important of these key ‘tells’ of pundit-speech is that the frame – economic and political – for action and analysis… is kept narrow… with a focus on the nation-state.
Reich’s speech is riddled with this one… and not he alone… it seems to be a job requirement in order to be a left pundit.
This tactic became evident almost at once with his reference (a standard among U.S. left ‘economists’) to an alleged Economic Golden Era of the post-World War II U.S…. “when corporations supposedly shared the wealth, and the people had money to spend… and the U.S. economic engine pulled everyone along behind it.”
Now, Reich has provided better illustrations of this misdirection elsewhere… and it’s not stated as clearly here as in the film Heist, or the standard talk we hear from Richard Wolff… but it’s implied… and it’s been on my mind to unpack the implications of this con.
…listen to what your body says… which for more and more of us globally is… “I'm tired… I'm tired of this mess [called coerced work and the raping of the earth…]” The so-called economic golden era of the 1960s is a subtle promotion of the ‘nation-state’ as the only important frame… (pt. 2)
He said:
My students, who are very idealistic… and they do want to change the world… they don’t have very much of a memory of government or even of a society that we are a part of expanding equal opportunity, changing the structure of power. They don’t remember as I do the 1960s…
Because when so much of the income and wealth go to the top, the rest simply don’t have the purchasing power to keep the economy going at full employment.
… if you put more money people’s pockets, they can turn around and buy stuff, which means more jobs, not fewer jobs. (Robert Reich)
This is misdirection on multiple levels. To say that in the post-WWII period, the U.S. was an economic engine that generated prosperity in which all of ‘its’ people shared is… as per usual in economic theory… upside-down. The global industrial machine ripped bloody the resources of many lands… and paid many U.S. citizens… for their unconscious complicity… with the entrails. And to suggest this should be what we want for our future… even if you could force it on the world again… is obscene.
And we must always acknowledge that the hierarchical arrangement of the world by which some in the so-called ‘knowledge-sectors’ seem to ‘benefit’… is also replicated within states. If you’re crafting – using control of the flow of money as your chisel – a hierarchical world order… ‘hierarchy’ is a principle that must be reinforced within states as between them…
…if only by trucking in immigrant labor… or ranking children in the schools…. If all are winners, dangerous thoughts might start to brew.
And when ‘economists’ say that it’s people ‘buying stuff’ that “keeps ‘the economy’ running…” what they’re really saying is that it’s ‘money’ that “keeps ‘the economy’ running…” and since it is ‘power’ with its stashed trillions that controls where the money goes… and uses its muscle to price ‘hand-work’ low… they’re obviously saying that it’s ‘power’ that “keeps ‘the economy’ running…”
…but ‘money’ is a stand-in for the earth – either the earth called our brothers and sisters or the earth beneath our feet – and its consumption… so when Reich tells us to lust for more products… more stuff… to keep ‘power’s teeth gnashing at our Grandmother’s flesh… don’t listen…
…listen rather to what your body says.
So this is a constructed mythology that only stands up if we pretend to believe that this thing called the ‘U.S. economy’ sets the terms in which ‘power’ thinks… and operates according to… as opposed to thinking in terms of ‘the global market’… and being a global operator…
…it only stands up if we pretend not to see that the ‘U.S. economy’ is in fact the compact manifestation… of a substantial portion of the resources of the globe.
The so-called ‘U.S. economy’ is a ladder-location in a world hierarchical order… in which your place is determined by how much of the earth you can claim.
The so-called ‘economic golden era of the 1960s’ simply means a feeding frenzy… a gluttonous eating of our sisters and brothers shoved onto the global plate by their dictators…
…it’s a subtle promotion of the ‘nation-state’ as the only important frame….
The ‘eye of ‘power’ shifted to choice pickings and some in the U.S. were briefly feasted on less. This is not my definition of ‘success’ for we-the-people.
And as to putting money in our hands so we can buy things… and using this as our standard for whether we have been provided with the requisite ‘happiness’… I don’t think so….
And while I suppose it’s true that if ‘power’ were struck dumb and insensate… if it fell asleep for a hundred years or so… and all the money that goes to surveillance and so-called ‘security’… and to subsidizing all the ‘industry’ that destroys the planet fastest… were instead given to those needing food and shelter… ‘in exchange,’ let’s say… for building their own Earthships and gardens… and you called this process ‘creating short-term employment’…
…I suppose if you did this… ‘happiness’ would indeed be served… and earth would be preserved… returned to ‘careful stewardship’…
…but… what if ‘power’ then sits up… gives itself a shake… and revisits all of its banks… retrieving its (now grown) trillions… and looks about for what it must eat… first… to restore the rule of ‘statesmen’…
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What Reich is calling for here is a ‘re-set’ of the economic and political order …by “‘re-setting’ the next generation” on the fruitless path of ceding to ‘power’ the design of the world…
Now why does this matter? Why is this significant misdirection? Because it propagates the con that the problem is that corporations are taking more than their ‘fair share’ of the ‘basically good economic system’ that used to crank out ‘jobs’… and so ‘the good life’… could happen ‘once again’… if ‘the rules’ could somehow be ‘re-set’… and the ‘Right-wing’ effort’ to sow the seeds of ‘cynicism’ were defeated.
So what Reich is calling for here is a ‘re-set’ of the ‘economic order’ – by ‘reining in ‘corporate greed’ – and a ‘re-set’ of the ‘political order’ – by prodding young people to believe in it again… an attempt to re-fix their eyes on ‘fixing the state’…
…in a sense ‘re-setting’ the next generation on the fruitless path of ceding to ‘power’ the design of the world.
He says:
Well, like many people who are my age, the 1960s were the formative era.
We were involved in the Civil Rights Movement, even peripherally, the anti-Vietnam War movement. I spent a lot of time organizing young people for Eugene McCarthy; went clean for Gene in 1968. But, out of all of that came a sense of efficacy, a sense that we really could change the world. There had been a civil rights act, a voting rights act, we ended the Vietnam War and there was also an assumption that I shared with many people that, of course, you would spend much of your life working to improve society. Even if that was not going to be your official vocation or your job. Still, that was part of your work, part of your life’s work. It wasn’t just me. There were really millions of us. I think that assumption may be different now. One of the great victories of the right, particularly the radical right, has been to spread such cynicism about the capacity of the country to change and generate social justice that many people just have given up. They basically I don’t want anything to do with politics, it is all corrupt, I don’t want anything to do with that kind of focus on social movements at that scale. They will go nowhere. But that, you see, that kind of cynicism about our politics and our government cedes everything, cedes control to the money interests. And that is exactly what they want. (Robert Reich)
So ‘the problem’ is ‘money’ again… not the class system he’s so deeply embedded in.
And the problem is… supposedly… ‘cynicism’?
Reich calls it ‘cynicism’ to conclude that when millions ‘working’ for half a century… dedicating themselves to incrementally improving our lives… produce an outcome in which “people who are in the top 1 percent… are doing even better than… they have done since 1928…” in which “the top 10% of earners take more than half the country’s total income, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting relevant data a century ago…” to conclude, then, that these millions were misled… he calls ‘cynicism’… instead of ‘stating the obvious.’
To conclude that the strategy of ‘incremental change’… in the face of organized, ruthless ‘power’… is fruitless… far from being ‘cynical’… is quite sane.
Particularly as… if Reich is successful in wooing youth back into the game of ‘power’… and they throw away this chance presented by our Global Awakening… to link hands with their brothers and sisters globally… then… when they stagger out of their stupor to find the oceans are indeed dying… and they’ve… once again… been lied to… and the prison walls between us are even higher this time… and the ‘history’ books all say that we were gifted this marvelously efficient system… of inter-linking global ‘obligations’… in which everyone knows their place… and that their lives have meaning thanks… to the wisdom and intelligence… of the ‘philosopher-statesmen’… and ‘the people’ have retreated into the solace of spiritual beliefs (with occasional out-breaks of unaccountable hates…) back to Buddhism or ‘meditation’… back to huddling in prison cells or units… dreaming of a far-away day when we take from our wings the clips… and we finally use our gifts… and we link hands across the planet…
As if seeing through the cons of this system means we’re ‘giving up’… far from it. Either the compelling global quality of our building resistance is invisible to Robert Reich or he’s trying to subvert it.
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Max-Neef's new paradigm for the world… OK finally… we’re talking the right scale… let’s follow up…
Now to the ‘coitus flirtatious’…
Toward the end of the interview Amy Goodman brings Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef to the table, introducing him with these words:
I want to turn to another economist, Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef, who has advocated for the idea of an economics crimes tribunal. I interviewed him over Independence Day weekend when he was attending a meeting of Right Livelihood Award Laureates in Bogotá, Colombia. He won their Right Livelihood Award after his publication of his book, Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics. I asked him what he was talking about with this economic crimes tribunal, why he felt one was needed. (Amy Goodman)
And the excerpt Amy Goodman played was this:
Well, we know that everything that has happened now in these last years, and we know that many, or practically all, of the big problems: environment, assassinations of leaders, in the Ama-zon and other places, and unemployment, and desperation, and all of the suicides that are increasing dramatically in Spain and other places of the world—we know all these, in the end, until now, are the origin of what I call an evil—an absolutely evil—economic model that is dominating the world.
This economy cannot go on any longer because it has become absolutely criminal. I was last year in the Zermatt meeting in Switzerland, with about 400 people participating, all high-level people from different countries of the world, and I gave the opening speech. In the speech I said, well, I’m going to start with a very brutal statement. The statement is that this economic model is killing more people in the world than all the armies put together. And this is people who die of hunger or of other diseases that would not be happening now if there was a more just, and I would even say decent, economic model.
What we are working on now is really a humane process. I am now one of the members appointed by the King of Bhutan, the General Assembly, one of the 60 national experts, who are designing a new economic paradigm and developing a paradigm for the world, which is based on well-being and happiness and ecological sustainability and adequate distribution of wealth and intelligent use of natural resources. But the main component is well-being and human happiness.
Along the lines of what was said by your wonderful, magnificent, and forgotten father of your country, Thomas Jefferson, the only one who wrote a political document in which happiness, the pursuit of happiness, is an inalienable right. (Manfred Max-Neef)
I find this excerpt interesting because he’s calling for… not ‘global society re-design’ – planning for which, on the part of ‘we-the-people’ I believe is urgently needed – but at least potentially a step toward it: “…a new economic paradigm and developing a paradigm for the world, which is based on well-being and happiness…”
And here was a chance for Robert Reich to say something substantive at last about ‘the economy’ – but, no… instead they talk about Chile.
Now all this strikes me as significant. Why did she re-frame it as some ‘hunting-down-and-punishing’ of ‘economic criminals’?
And why did Robert Reich gratefully drop the focus on the global economic order (let alone “a new paradigm for the world”!) like a hot potato?
(This essay was discussed on the September 15, 2013: The Waking Up Radio Show, a partial transcript of which can be read at: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided)
(See also: Getting To Our Future Freedom – 2) and You Know How I Know 'Localization' or 'Democratic Economics' Is A Con? and Bentham's Strategic Verities, and Conversation with Joel McIver )