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One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy By Thomas Frank ( Anchor )
Release Date: 2001-09-18
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Product Description
In a book that has been raising hackles far and wide, the social critic Thomas Frank skewers one of the most sacred cows of the go-go '90s: the idea that the new free-market economy is good for everyone.
Frank's target is "market populism"--the widely held belief that markets are a more democratic form of organization than democratically elected governments. Refuting the idea that billionaire CEOs are looking out for the interests of the little guy, he argues that "the great euphoria of the late nineties was never as much about the return of good times as it was the giddy triumph of one America over another." Frank is a latter-day Mencken, as readers of his journal The Baffler and his book The Conquest of Cool know. With incisive analysis, passionate advocacy, and razor-sharp wit, he asks where we?re headed-and whether we're going to like it when we get there.
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Amazon.com Review
After nearly a decade of bull markets, Americans have come to equate free markets with democracy. Never one for mincing words, social critic Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler and author of The Conquest of Cool, challenges this myth. With his acerbic wit and contempt for sophistry, he declares the New Economy a fraud. Frank scours business literature, management theory, and marketing and advertising to expose the elaborate fantasies that have inoculated business against opposition. This public relations campaign joins an almost mystical belief in markets, a contempt for government in any form, and an "ecstatic" confusion of markets with democracy. Frank traces the roots of this movement from the 1920s, and sees its culmination in market populism as a fusion of the rebellious '60s with the greedy '80s. The overarching irony is the swapping of roles--suddenly Wall Street is no longer full of stodgy moneygrubbers, but cool entrepreneurs "leaping on their trampolines, typing out a few last lines on the laptop before paragliding, riding their bicycles to work, listening to Steppenwolf while they traded." Meanwhile, "Americans traded their long tradition of electoral democracy for the democracy of the supermarket, where all brands are created equal and endowed by their creators with all sorts of extremeness and diversity." Frank's close reading of the salesmen of market populism nails such financial gurus as George Gilder, Joseph Nocera, Kevin Kelly, and Thomas Friedman. Their writings, he contends, have served to make "the world safe for billionaires" by winning the cultural and political battle--legitimizing the corporate culture and its demands for privatization, deregulation, and non-interference. Frank's incisive prose verges on brilliant at times, though his yen for repetition can be exasperating. In either case, his boisterous reminder that markets are fundamentally not democracies is worth repeating as the level of wealth polarization in America reaches heights not seen since the 1920s. --Lesley Reed
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 Totalicorporatism ( doomsdayer520 )
This book was published in 2000 as an up-to-date expose on the then-ascendant corporate bubble which had not yet crashed and burned. Now the book is an informative history of the roots of a politically ruinous American epidemic - regular folks believing that the interests of the privileged classes are the same as their own. Thomas Frank is very adept at finding the nonsense and contradictions of the American political scene (especially in the much better "What's the Matter with Kansas" a few years later) and he provides a great amount of insight into the forces that turned us into worshippers of the same power players who destroy our livelihoods. Most of the book deals with the 1990s, when corporations graduated from villains in the eyes of the public to bastions of democracy. This was accomplished with relentless rhetoric in the press and politics about the unassailable greatness of markets, and the widespread ignorant use of the epithet "elitist" for anyone who disagreed with corporate dogma, regardless of whether the critics were regular citizens or the targets were influence-buying and job-destroying plutocrats. We have let it happen by falling for hogwash about how corporations think they represent the people and how the incorruptible market will lead us to utopia.
But aside from these great basic insights, overall this book is too polemical for its own good, as Frank's goal was clearly to rile up the masses. Unfortunately he falls into sarcasm and proselytizing far too often. A related issue is the book's massive repetitiveness, as Frank piles on point after point that merely regurgitate the main thesis that was advanced believably long before, while the chapters on academia and journalism are somewhat useful but stray pretty far from the main narrative of corporate hegemony. (As a graduate student who has been forced to digest cultural studies, and as a media researcher, I can also say that Frank's tirades against those subjects are pretty narrow, though I tend to agree with them in principle.) Most annoyingly, Frank often makes his points by merely deconstructing large numbers of ridiculous and obscure books that are even more outdated than this one.
It's totally easy for the thinking American to agree with Frank's polemics whole-heartedly and to demand more equality in the political and economic spheres. But this book makes its main points early on and then simply beats them to death. And one major component of Frank's argument is completely missing - why have thinking citizens let this happen? We can blame the corporations and politicians for spouting nonsense, but that nonsense will go nowhere unless people swallow it voluntarily. [~doomsdayer520~]
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 revealing
although it seemed a bit repetetive at times, this book was right on. i guess it seemed that way to me because everything was so intertwined. Many thanks to pbs for bringing this author to my attention.
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 Very Worthwhile
If you want to know how the economy really works and who is really in charge, read this book. You don't need to agree with all of the author's conclusions, but the the facts and arguments presented are very compelling.
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Solid thoughtful, nails our national policy failures in a big way ( cannotputbearintothisspace )
This is a very serious book, one that any candidate for President would do well to read, especially so the centrist candidates willing to announce that both the Democratic and Republican parties have sold the public into slavery to corporate fascism.
In summary, the author documents in detail how the Reagan Revolution, and especially the firing of the air traffic controllers and the wrongful use of military air traffic controllers as "union busting" scabs, eliminated the counter-vailing force of labor unions, at the same time that government deregulated and abdicated its responsibility for a social safety net, the media converted into advertising with a "news hole," and corporations lost all moral and social standards.
He deconstructs the "New Economy" in persuasive detail and caused me to re-evaluate some of my earlier readings, especially of Kevin Kelly and others in the WIRED generation who articulate with blind faith the democratic value of the network, but fail to see, as Robert Samuelson and this author would have us understand, that outsourcing is union busting, and the actual effect of the network has been to make it possible for corporations to outsource middle class jobs while importing poverty through illegal immigration. The net loser is the Nation, because one of its most important sources of national power, an educated engaged citizenry, is being sold short.
The author is brutally on target when he points out that corporations have achieved a slight of hand in disconnecting labor from the value of created wealth, claiming much more management value (to the point that CEOs make 400 to 1000 times what their workers make, up from 25 times long ago). He also points out that the democratization of the stock market is code for what Mark Lewis called, in "Liar's Poker," "exploding the client. The smart money rides the early surge and then sells out to the middle class dreamers, who end up losing 80-90% of their value over time.
I have a note in the flyleaf that this book is "quite extraordinary, almost breathtaking in scope, with a compelling array of well-ordered facts."
Overall, while many will not like the term "corporate fascism" and the author prefers to use "extreme capitalism" while others discuss immoral and predatory capitalism, or "class war" (see my review of Faux's "The Global Class War" and, somewhat less solid but still good, Pabast's "Armed Madhouse" (dispatches from the front lines of the global class war). The sorry reality is that Americans have been lulled to sleep like sheep for a slaughter, and do not seem to appreciate the fact that there has been a MASSIVE theft of public capital through what this author calls "the Wall Street tax" on America.
The greatest strength of the book is how the author documents the calculated and comprehensive manner in which Wall Street and the evangelical right came together to turn reality on its head, and persuade everyone including blue collar workers that it was okay to break the social contract with labor, and that what is good for Wall Street is good for America and its workers. In fact, as the author points out repeatedly, when workers get laid off, Wall Street stocks go up. His entire review reminds one of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's classic "Manufacturing Consent." Public relations has been used in a classic manner by American corporations, to include penetration of teen-age sub-cultures and the manipulation of teen-age desires. In Europe they consider public relations to be, according to this author, advanced corporate lying.
The author draws an excellent connection between the "blind faith" that keeps the corporate illusion of free trade on the table, and the "blind faith" that led Dick Cheney to depose George Bush and invade Iraq without regard to the policy process, accountability, or reality. America is in the grip of a very destructive combination of corporate ideology, religious ideology, and political ideology.
The author is properly and comprehensively critical of the media for failing to do its job. Journalists, a few exceptions aside, have become "filler." The author excels at picking Tom Friedman apart, and at mocking the Wall Street Journal for idiocy in print.
The book ends on a sobering note, where the author points out that reality has a way of unmasking ideological pretensions in a most painful manner. He specifically suggests that George Bush Junior (he does not mention Cheney) will go the way of Herbert Hoover in the history books. Reality--that's what one White House staffer is reported to have said had no relevance, because this White House "creates its own reality." Yes it does--a reality of greed and theft and immorality at the top, poverty and disease at the bottom, and a loss of American honor around the world.
First class thinking and writing. A really strong book.
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Enlightening romp through a decade of idiocy ( aaronsw )
From John Perry Barlow to Virginia Postrel, from _Liberation Management_ to _Who Moved My Cheese?_, from dot-com millionaires to cult stud academics, Thomas Frank summarizes, contextualizes, and debunks a decade's worth of pro-business propaganda. The major theme, he argues, was the concept of "market populism", the notion that The Market was far more democratic than actual democracies, doing whatever their copious focus groups had determined the people wanted. Frank, a serious supporter of genuine democracy, skewers their absurd myths and provides some insight into the harm they did to working people.
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Addiction
