----- Original Message ----- From: Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 4:36 PM Subject: [CrashList] Critique of "New Economy" NY Times, December 21, 2000 An Author Savagely Indicts Notions of a New Economy By JOHN SCHWARTZ CHICAGO - The telephone rings. It does not chirp or beep, it rings - an actual clapper strikes brass bells and the 1940's Bakelite body shudders - like a voice from another time, like a wake-up call. Thomas Frank answers. He has been waiting, here in his home office in the Hyde Park neighborhood. On the other end of the line is an interviewer from a National Public Radio station at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, ready to fill an hour with a phone-in discussion of Mr. Frank's new book, "One Market, Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy" (Doubleday). In a sweeping, savage and witty indictment of American business, Mr. Frank, 35, slams the notion that the 1990's lived up to the promise of the new economy - a sensibility summed up by commercials for WorldCom that ask, "Is this a great time, or what?" Mr. Frank argues that the answer is "or what." Behind the go-go stock market and the feel-good atmosphere, he says, the American economy that bloomed in the 1990's is sick: the divide between rich and poor has widened, he insists, and mechanisms like government regulation and unions that traditionally protected underdogs have been hobbled. Mergers and globalization, meanwhile, are homogenizing the world into one big Wal-Mart. Yet, he says, Americans have been sold the notion that the pixie-dust prosperity has touched almost everyone. His timing could not be better: Mr. Frank is riding a nascent wave of antibusiness resentment that shows itself in everything from consumer complaints about health maintenance organizations to trashed Starbucks stores during last year's World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Vice President Al Gore knew the sentiment was there when he attacked "big tobacco, big oil, the big polluters, the pharmaceutical companies, the H.M.O.'s." And even Business Week asked on its Sept. 11 cover: "Too Much Corporate Power?" "One Market, Under God" vivisects the libertarian manifestoes, management how-to books, academic gobbledygook, advertisements and finance-oriented cable networks to describe Mr. Frank's key bête noire: market populism. This phrase, Mr. Frank argues, captures a new genre of spin that turns traditional populism on its head. Instead of the classic populist stance on behalf of the little guy, market populism hijacks the power-to-the-people language to glorify capitalism and its biggest winners. Yeoman farmer, make way for the Foosball-playing high-technology chief executive, courtesy of evangelists like George Gilder, the former Reagan administration icon turned tech cheerleader; Tom Peters, the management guru; Walter Wriston, once the chief executive of Citicorp; and the creators of the Motley Fool stock-pickers Web site. Mr. Frank has been laying out elements of this argument for some time in his obscure magazine, The Baffler, and in earlier books, including "Commodify Your Dissent (W. W. Norton, 1997). But "One Market, Under God," published in November, is his manifesto. He attacks business pretensions, not with the cruel streak of Michael Moore in his films or the studied folksiness of Jim Hightower on radio, but with a cool, ironic wit that evokes the line of Elvis Costello, the rock star, who sang, "Oh, I used to be disgusted/And now I try to be amused." As he sits through the radio interview, elbows propped on his aged oak desk and head resting on his hands, Mr. Frank gives his spiel, its freshness faded by repetition over the course of a grueling book tour. He has returned just the night before from a California swing. But he limbers mentally as he speaks, his voice almost preppy and slightly nasal, holding up his part of the disembodied conversation, the anger rising. The sentences build and flow with the fluidity of hot jazz and the urgency of hard rock, one thought after another tumbling out. With the business boom on the Internet, he says: "A lot of business thinkers thought they had happened onto a kind of Golden Age, onto a new world. There's a business magazine out there calling itself Business 2.0, as if all of, all of history was, like, version 1.3, 1.4, that sort of thing - and then now we've turned this Grand Corner, and market populism is kind of the expression of that feeling, of business at its most righteous, and at its most self-confident, and most willing to take on its enemies and, and shout them down if you will." Full article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/21/business/21ANTI.html _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
