Our Imagined Economy
OK, Jared – you’re enabling me, so I’ll just get more apocalyptic.
First, I think your YOYO (You’re On Your Own) vs. WITT (We’re In This Together) forrmulation is brilliant and I’m glad the Dems have picked up on it. I’m wondering, though, whether a YOYO economy is even worth calling an “economy.” The notion of an “economy” implies that we are all connected in some way, through our wages, the prices we pay, etc. Of course, we are. But when “the economy” serves only a few, at the expense of the many, it becomes a kind of “granfalloon” – Kurt Vonnegut’s term for an imagined community, like the “community” of Redskins’ fans.
And granfalloons are distracting. We say, “There’s something wrong with the economy,” rather than, “I’m getting screwed by the oil companies, the banks, and my employer.” Things get mystified and depersonalized. We say there’s a “recession,” as if were some sort of bad weather, rather than pointing our fingers at the people who brought it down on us and who are, for the most part, profiting still. Maybe, instead of talking about “the economy” and “the recession” we should be talking about the ongoing looting and concerted attack on our standard of living --which will likely end only when there’s nothing left to squeeze out of us.
This isn’t just semantics. If there’s something wrong with “the economy,” we call in the economists, we think about intervention by the Fed, and things on that level. But if someone is actually attacking us, we’re more likely to focus on how we can start working for change right now, with whatever tools are at hand. An example would be the protesting truck drivers I wrote about yesterday, who just started driving very very slowly.
In times like these, the WITT approach becomes all the more important. I recently saw a full-page ad in the paper for a seminar or conference on how to get rich in hard times. Lots of luck to those who shell out the fee for this garbage! The reality is that we have to stick together more than ever, finding ways to organize for change and just survive. How are we going to get food, for example, when diesel fuel gets so expensive that trucks are no longer delivering it?
Let’s hope things don’t to come to that, and that this broken economy keeps shambling along and that most of us still get to eat. But I just read in the Washington Post that the demands on food banks are up 30 percent since a year ago, which I found deeply chilling.
Comments (8)
I've been wondering when folks would start noticing the bread lines.
Thank you so much for this post, Ms. Ehrenreich, it's nice to know I'm not crazy.
April 8, 2008 2:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not only is demand on Food Banks way up, but here in Spokane, WA at least one of the oldest outlets has been recently closed down!
talk about 'crunch'!
April 8, 2008 3:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
I like the title to your post.
"The economy" does require a certain suspension of disbelief. After all, look who designed it: an invisible hand. :)
I hope you keep blasting "the economy". Tell me what I can do to help Jared enable you.
April 8, 2008 6:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Loved the reference to Vonnegut's granfalloons.
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Here's another way to think of it: Quasi-tribalism. Just because the upper 1 percent or so have the means to influence economic policy, they have become a tribe. As a tribe, they haven't been able to resist the temptation to become warlike and pillage the rest of the economy. Hence the enthusiasm for globalization, offshoring, outsourcing, "bubbles" and all manner of financial hinkiness and shenanigans.
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Meanwhile, the rest of us, because we have no means, are unable to form competing tribes. Heck, we can't even form unions, let alone rise up in bloody rebellion against the marauding Tribe of the Upper 1 Percent. Hence the granfalloon effect.
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Of course, we look at tribalism in other countries (it's blooming quite nicely in Iraq, for instance) and shake our heads. And invariably it's an awful mess. However, most Americans are incapable of rising even to that level of awfulness. We are sub-tribal. The great majority of us are lost in the miasmic belief that some residue of traditional Western, Christian values endures and that, somehow, we'll be all right.
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Meanwhile, the Upper 1 Percent is chewing on our livers.
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By the way, Upper 1 Percent tribalism has no exclusive claim on Republicans. A few months ago, Mother Jones ran a handy little pie chart showing which industries are funding which candidates. As I recall, the major Dems (including Obama and Clinton) were funded mainly by the financial, insurance and real estate industries, with a generous fraction from Big Pharma. The Repubs, meanwhile, were funded by Big Oil. That's pretty much all you need to know about any of them.
April 9, 2008 9:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
The point is that Euphemism is the new Soma...
"The Economy lost 83,000 jobs in March."
Who cares...
"200,000 Americans lost their livelyhoods, healthcare and face hunger and homelessness this March."
"83,000 bread winners fired in March, what will happen to their families?"
Personified, human. Putting a human face on issues is HUGE for Progressives.
As long as it's euphemistically talked about, people are desensitized to the actual ramifications of the numbers.
Numbers and econ speak are extremely un-emotive.
I used to hate listening to Alan Greenspan until I realized what his Euphemistic language really meant, until I learned what his droll delivery and econspeak gobbledygook really meant.
The "flexible labor markets" he talked about that were propping up our economy was a euphemism for people fearing the loss of their jobs.
Flexible labor markets were good because it reduced the bargaining power of labor.
Wow, that sounds OK. Well how do we make the labor markets more flexible?
How about the personified version?
The fact that Americans fear losing their jobs is a huge benefit to the economy because when you have people over a barrel they'll work for less.
The fear of losing one's job and healthcare and losing the ability to support one's family is great for the economy. It makes people easier to exploit.
If Greenspan spoke like that, or if someone actually challenged his econ gobbledygook with humanity, we'd never be in this mess.
April 9, 2008 7:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
CRVD: careful with those Mother Jones numbers. They classify the money based on the employer of the giver. So, if you're an administrative assistant for a real estate agent, and you give money to Obama, poof, it's the real estate industry funding Obama. Likewise if you work for an insurance company (big insurance funds candidate X!) or you're an RN (the medical lobby owns candidate Y!).
Now, for the big givers (those who've maxed out) the employer is relevant information. It's not so clear for those candidates that rely on large numbers of small donations.
Also, corporate PACs give in the interest of their controllers, the corporations, so their money should be looked on with suspicion.
April 9, 2008 7:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Where is the outrage? I'm paying three times as much as last year to keep my house at under 65 degrees, I have a good job, make decent money and I'm scraping by because of heating oil! How do people do it who are on a fixed income? And yet I rarely see letters to the editor or people complaining. What's the deal? Why are people just suffering silently?
April 9, 2008 8:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with the Vonnegut characterization, but what Ehrenreich is describing may square more with Orwell's Animal Farm. We split from the two-legs (England) ostensibly with an eye towards the four-legs having equality amongst each other. But of course the whole time, the pigs were working out how to become the new two-legs and send poor Boxer to the glue factory.
We've never been in this together. Each generation breeds a new batch of power-graspers intent on being top pig, which doesn't mean anything unless there's a bottom pig. YOYO sucks, but it's the foundation of our economy.
April 10, 2008 3:08 PM | Reply | Permalink