Thomas Frank: The god that sucked: How the Tea Party right just makes the 1 percent richer

[HomerRamone]

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/06/the_god_that_sucked_how_the_tea_party_right_just_makes_the_1_percent_richer/

Then, one fine day, you check in at Ameritrade and find that your tech portfolio is off 90 percent. Your department at work has been right-sized, meaning you spend a lot more time at the office — without getting a raise. You have one kid in college to the tune of $30,000 a year, another with no health insurance because she’s working as a temp. Or maybe you lost your job because they can do it cheaper in Alabama or Mexico. Your daughter’s got a disease that requires $400 a month in drugs, and your COBRA insurance benefits are due to run out in two months. Or maybe you’re the Mexican worker who just got a new maquiladora job. You have no electricity, no running water, no school for your children, no healthcare, and your wage is below subsistence level. And should you make any effort to change these conditions — say, by organizing a union not aligned with the corrupt PRI — you’re likely to get blacklisted by local factory managers.

That’s when it dawns on you: The market is a god that sucks. Yes, it cashed a few out at the tippy top, piled up the loot of the world at their feet, delivered shiny Lexuses into the driveways of their 10-bedroom suburban chateaux. But for the rest of us the very principles that make the market the object of D’Souza’s worship, of Gilder’s awestruck piety, are the forces that conspire to make life shitty in a million ways great and small. The market is the reason our housing is so expensive. It is the reason our public transportation is lousy. It is the reason our cities sprawl idiotically all across the map. It is the reason our word processing programs stink and our prescription drugs cost more than anywhere else. In order that a fortunate few might enjoy a kind of prosperity unequaled in human history, the rest of us have had to abandon ourselves to a lifetime of casual employment, to unquestioning obedience within an ever more arbitrary and despotic corporate regime, to medical care available on a maybe/maybe-not basis, to a housing market interested in catering only to the fortunate. In order for the libertarians of Orange County to enjoy the smug sleep of the true believer, the 30 million among whom they live must join them in the dark.

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For all this vast and sparkling intellectual production, though, Americans hear surprisingly little about what it’s like to be managed. Perhaps the reason for this is because, when viewed from below, all the glittering, dazzling theories of management seem to come down to the same ugly thing. This is the lesson that Barbara Ehrenreich learns from the series of low-wage jobs that she works and then describes in bitter detail in her book “Nickel and Dimed.” Pious chatter about “free agents” and “empowered workers” may illuminate the covers of Fast Company and Business 2.0, but what strikes one most forcefully about the world of waitresses, maids and Wal-Mart workers that Ehrenreich enters is the overwhelming power of management, the intimidating array of advantages it holds in its endless war on wages. This is a place where even jobs like housecleaning have been Taylorized to extract maximum output from workers (“You know, all this was figured out with a stopwatch,” Ehrenreich is told by a proud manager at a maid service), where omnipresent personality and drug tests screen out those of assertive nature, where even the lowliest of employees are overseen by professional-grade hierarchs who crack the whip without remorse or relent, where workers are cautioned against “stealing time” from their employer by thinking about anything other than their immediate task, and where every bit of legal, moral, psychological, and anthropological guile available to advanced civilization is deployed to prevent the problem of pay from ever impeding the upward curve of profitability. This is the real story of life under markets.

The social panorama that Ehrenreich describes should stand as an eternal shrine to the god that sucked: slum housing that is only affordable if workers take on two jobs at once; exhausted maids eating packages of hot-dog buns for their meals; women in their 20s so enfeebled by this regimen that they can no longer lift the vacuum cleaners that the maid service demands they carry about on their backs; purse searches, drug tests, personality tests, corporate pep rallies. Were we not so determined to worship the market and its boogie-boarding billionaires, Ehrenreich suggests, we might even view their desperate, spent employees as philanthropists of a sort, giving selflessly of their well-being so that the comfortable might live even more comfortably. “They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for,” she writes; “they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high.”

[renate]

1. K&R

Thomas Frank is always so excellent.