Free your mind
by Tom Sullivan
Sen. Elizabeth Warren regularly tells audiences, “This economy works great for those at the top but not so great for everyone else.” Sometimes she substitutes “Washington” for economy. Other times, it’s “country” or “government.” Her point is, “The ultra-rich have rigged” the system we live under for their benefit, not ours.
I want to augment her framing with this. The root problem isn’t that the economy doesn’t work for people; it is that people work for the economy. Given the economy cannot exist without people, some may argue this is a distinction without a difference. Then again, plantations could not exist without slaves. “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” Master, indeed.
Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders speak of creating, or remaking, an economy that works for everyone/everybody. An economy that serves people. People working for the economy is servitude. If that’s what it feels like, there is a reason.
Business interests have reformatted government of, by and for the people to serve the economy first and citizens second. It happened so slowly over decades, few noticed. News outlets, politicians and pundits concern themselves first with how the economy is doing, not with how people are doing in the economy. How will this policy or program affect the economy? Not how might it improve people’s lives. They concern themselves with economic trends, the stock market, trade balances, etc. Things easier to measure. People’s well-being is less easily quantified.
Over time, business interests have conditioned us and our government to view the world and our places in it through a corporate lens. We buy and sell humans as data. Why? Companies want to know how to sell them stuff. We evaluate immigrants not by their humanity, but by metrics meant to measure the likelihood of their “economic assimilation into the United States.” If we let in immigrants/migrants/refugees, will they dutifully serve the economy? Ask not what your economy can do for you….
I wrote last fall:
The consumer culture celebrated by the Thanksgiving to New Year’s season and day-to-day existence shapes not only the way we live our lives, but the way we see ourselves. Homo corporatus views the world through the eyes of accountancy. What is the bottom line? She/he is a consumer. Every human interaction is a transaction. Still an animal, base desires for food, sex, and power still control decision-making. But the way we order society is increasingly reducing us to data. Data to be aggregated. Data to be consumed. Data to sell us products. Data to control us. Data to validate our worth … as consumers. Humans who are not have none. The First People learned this the hard way.
We have become in some ways, as popularized in fiction, living batteries in a vast machine, going through life unaware of the assumptions we have internalized:
Having unconsciously absorbed the mindset of the bottom line, the balance sheet, and return on investment, we blithely dismiss how such an arrangement treats employees who have put their lives into businesses owned by absentee landlords. “It’s not personal … It’s strictly business.” What’s decency got to do with it?
For those left with their pensions shorted and their lives upended, it is very personal. When it was Social Security taxes Pres. George W. Bush wanted to turn over to Wall Street or tax withholdings he wanted to send out in refunds, it was “your money.” Except when it is negotiated pensions and benefits, it’s investors’. Tough luck.
The failure of such a system was palpable in Warren’s Fort Wayne, Indiana town hall this week. Among workers who lost their jobs to offshoring and feel “betrayed.” Among women struggling to find child care. They know they’ve been betrayed. They’ve been taught it is their own, damned fault. And perhaps visually among Americans in Chris Arnade’s “Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America.”
Arnade is a former Wall Street trader who left on an eight-year journey to explore and photograph an America not served by the economy. Except perhaps by McDonald’s. The ubiquitous fast food restaurant functions as an ad hoc community center in many places the economy has left behind. Kirkus Review elaborates, “In every community, Arnade listened to residents’ life stories: about drug addiction, alcoholism, homelessness, abuse, unemployment, and eviction. He listened, also, as people told him about the importance of faith to help them make peace with their lack of control over their lives and connect them with ‘something beyond the material.’”
The problem is, Kirkus finds, “Although he concludes that everyone—in the front row and the back—must listen, keep from being judgmental, and understand others’ values, he offers no other suggestions for changing an exclusionary, exploitative, racist system that has created vast economic and social inequality, drug addiction, and humiliation.”
And that — that uncaring system — works fine for powerful people and businesses that have molded and twisted America’s government to serve themselves at others’ expense. What’s more, they have conditioned those struggling to keep up to blame themselves for lack of initiative or laziness. Workers learn to accept their fate as the way things are and the only way they can be. That they are at best human resources, organic batteries for fueling the economy, or else worthless. All that “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” was just so much gauzy marketing to keep them unconscious to the truth: the economy is their master. If they work, they work for it. It doesn’t work for them, as Market intended.
This truth is what Warren, Sanders, and Occupy before them have revealed. The deck is stacked in business’ favor. The Economy as configured only works for a few at the top and expects the rest of us to serve. Freeing people’s minds is the first step to creating the kind of country people want to live in. Taking back control will be one helluva fight. Sanders wants a revolution but is vague on the details. Warren says, “You start with what you believe is right and then you get out there and fight for it!” But it will take a movement to make that happen. Whether voters awakening to the truth are willing to participate will depend upon which candidates are better at inspiring one.