Let Them Eat Praise

I'm chugging along, mostly happily, through Nina Eliasoph's The Politics of Volunteering, with the occasional bump.  For example, at one point she refers to ACT-UP as a "gay rights organization," which it emphatically was not: though most of its active members probably were gay men, its activism was about the treatment (in various senses of the word) of people with HIV/AIDS, not all of whom were gay or male.  From her sole reference to ACT-UP's methods as "stag[ing] 'kiss-ins' at ice-cream parlors in the 1980s" (52), it sounds like she has ACT-UP confused with Queer Nation, which came along a few years later and borrowed ACT-UP's approach to activism to advance GLBTQ visibility.

Again, in a list (borrowed from other scholars' definitions) of what makes a NGO or Non-Governmental Organization, she specifies that an NGO is "not mainly aimed at generating profits for the CEOs" (96).  Strictly speaking, the profits earned by a corporation do not go to the CEO, who is a manager, not an owner; profits are supposed to go to the shareholders.  In practice, of course, many CEOs receive stocks as part of their compensation and in some corporations the CEO is a founder and major stockholder (think Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg), but their role as stockholders is theoretically separate from their role as managers.  This isn't just a technical quibble, because many people think that managers are owners and entrepreneurs, which is only true some of the time.

So, for example, you get people like Eddie Lampert, a hedge-fund manager and Ayn Rand fan who took over K-Mart and later Sears, driving them both into the ground while enriching himself.  I guess he owns those companies, but he didn't build them and has effectively destroyed them.

Some refer to Lampert as a corporate raider. He prefers the term “active investor.” It must be admitted that Lampert wasn’t only interested in stripping the assets of his retail giant to make a fortune off it right away. He thought he could increase profits, too. After making a nice wad of cash from Kmart by selling off the valuable real estate sitting under dozens of stores, shutting down 600 stores and laying off tens of thousands of workers in the name of cost-cutting and thereby jacking up the stock price, he got bigger ideas. He would use Kmart to take over another ginormous retailer, Sears.

What background did Lampert have in retail? None at all. But never mind that. He was a Wall Street genius, and he would make this thing work by harnessing the power of data and numbers and letting the invisible hand of the market guide his Franken-company to glory. He even hired Paul DePodesta, the statistician of “Moneyball” fame, to advise him. When Kmart acquired Sears, the new company, Sears Holdings, became one of the largest retailers in the U.S., and Lampert became its CEO. He took on the Herculean task of integrating two vastly complex companies. And he brought on a guy that knew all about restaurants and nothing about retail to help him, Aylwin Lewis, former president of YUM! Brands.

Reactions ranged from surprise to predictions of doom. Mark Tatge at Forbes called him “Crazy Eddie” and decided that he must be planning to liquidate the whole shebang, perhaps slowly, by dumping stores (Sears owns a ton of valuable real estate) and using the money to do stock buybacks (more on that later) that would further enrich him.

It turns out that contrary to Lampert’s notion, you actually do need to know something about a business in order to manage it well. There’s really no substitute for industry-specific experience. And bigger is not always better — a gigantic corporation can be too unwieldy and complex to thrive, especially when your management philosophy is derived from a writer of bad novels.

... Sears has lost half its value in five years.

I like that bit about preferring to be known as an "active investor."  (You're not a corporate raider, Eddie, you're just big-boned!)  As an investor, he has made out like gangbusters, as a result of the detachment of finance from production enabled by the deregulation "reforms" of the post-Reagan period.  So he's a very good investor, but a very bad manager.

Still, The Politics of Volunteering has a lot of good stuff in it.  (To avoid any confusion, I should point out that the material about Sears and Eddie Lampert that I just quoted comes not from The Politics of Volunteering but from an article by Lynn Stuart Parramore at Salon.)  For example:

"Community visioning," "strategic planning process," "asset mapping," "community forums," "training programs," these are some hints that a great deal of empowerment talk is in play.  From these phrases, it is hard to know what participants actually did.  Clearly, pamphlets with information were circulated, and indeed, if a person has enough money to buy healthful food or enough time to grow it, then such information could be a lifesaver.  Making ordinary citizens responsible for their own health can help them "make healthy choices."  But if a person is pregnant or has diabetes, information would not be enough.  At one such "health fair" in Los Angeles, I obtained a great deal of information, including a poster listing "One Hundred Ways to Praise Your Child" from the Los Angeles Child Guidance Clinic.  It is nice to praise one's child, but it made me think that they were being offered praise when what they needed was health care, food, places to get clean, fresh air and exercise, and child care [104-105].

Or this:

A famous case that seems, on the face of it, to illustrate the potential of a little seed money plus a little voluntarism too add up to a fully self-sustaining organization is Homeboys Industries.  A priest got former gang members in an impoverished East Angeles neighborhood to learn to bake and to sell their muffins, bread, cupcakes and croissants.  The program seemed to show clear as day that if only ghetto people got the entrepreneurial spirit and a small financial jumpstart, they would spring out of poverty.  The organization added on a gardening business, silk-screening company, tattoo-removal, day care, and other businesses.  By 2010, the NGO generated about $3.5 million a year, according to its founder ... But when donations started drying up after the financial crisis of 2008, it became clear that the Homeboys Industries depended on donations.  It still needed another seven million dollars a year from donors to continue to operate. Various government and private donors kicked in, to make this organization continue its valuable work.  It was not a profit-making enterprise.  It was not a good poster child for self-help -- unless, that is, we include as a "self-help" the fact that Homeboys Industries successfully marketed its worthiness, attracting donors to give money to it instead of to another potentially worthy cause [105-106].

There are a number of ways to interpret this story.  (That bit about "the entrepreneurial spirit" is, I hope, meant ironically.  Poor people are generally more entrepreneurial than the better-off.)  After all, profit-making companies also look for "donations" to keep them going, by selling stock.  Before you object that investors expect to get a return on the shares they buy, remember that they don't always get them.  Amazon, for example, has done remarkably well at selling stock although, "for more than a decade, Amazon has teetered between minimal profits and no profits.  In 2012, it said Tuesday [January 29, 2013], it lost money."  Further, for-profit companies expect and often get various kinds of government subsidies ranging from tax breaks to grants and other direct payments: Apple, to cite a notorious example, relies on the Chinese government to subsidize its supply chains there.  Without that socialist assistance, Apple might have to charge a few dollars more for their iPhones and perhaps take in a few dollars' less profit.  Economic unfreedom suits them just fine.  It would appear that Homeboy* Industries is just functioning like a normal American company.

*I'm not sure where Eliasoph got the extra "s" she put on "Homeboy"; their website doesn't have it.  Oh well; I've made such mistakes myself.

I'm From the Republican Party, and I'm Here to Help

I'm enjoying Nina Eliasoph's new book The Politics of Volunteering (Polity Press, 2013).  Her 1998 book Avoiding Politics made a strong impression on me (and as I've noted before, it's time I reread it), and this new one fits well with Sarah Sobieraj's Soundbitten, on political activism.  For now, a few notes.

Eliasoph has already brought up the Left vs. Right dichotomy a few times, though she recognizes its limitations.  On the anarchist Emma Goldman, she writes:

So we can see that if we want to line up Goldman along Left-Right lines, it is impossible.  The Left usually agrees with [Jane] Addams in favoring a strong state, to ensure equality of opportunity, and fears corporate power.  The Right, in contrast, fears a strong state and is not very worried about inequality; generally favors corporate power; and assumes that corporate heads are justified in using their financial power to influence elections; if they were clever enough to get rich running companies, they must also be clever enough to run everything else [38].

This is a fairly conventional description of American politics, but I'm bothered by it.  The American Right talks about the perils of big government, and claims to want to shrink it ("until you can drown it in the bathtub" is one of their taglines), but in practice, when they get into power, they increase government spending and deficits, and are eager for the State to violate people's privacy -- sodomy laws, restrictions on divorce, restrictions on contraception and abortion, for example.  (One of RWA1's finest moments was when he accused the Obama administration of thinking that "women's (and everyone's) bodies belong to the state, and there will never be an end to their intrusions on private decisions, if only to care for their 'property' and to mitigate the costs of taking care of it."  This was brought on by Obama's efforts to require insurance companies to cover the costs of contraception in their policies.  This initiative was opposed by conservatives who really do believe that women's bodies belong to the state, as well as to the church, which have the right to control them.  RWA1 is libertarian enough -- barely -- to tolerate women's reproductive freedom even though "I have queasy feelings about the subject of abortion," but he joined his elderly male right-wing compatriots in believing that the insurance mandate would require women to use contraception, a marvelous and typical bit of Rightist nuttery.)  The massive surveillance apparatus now under fire, thanks to Edward Snowden's whistleblowing, is a joint Republican-Democratic project, though that doesn't strain Eliasoph's categories because both parties are on the Right by any reasonable standard.

Most people who are ostensibly critical of Big Government don't have a very clear grasp on what government does.  I've been trying to remember the location of something I read on this point last week, about how little most people think about what their taxes pay for: roads, streets, bridges, parks, schools, public health projects, and much much more.  The "Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare" meme is notorious, but if the government at all levels did drown in the bathtub today, Americans' lives would get a lot harder very soon.  I'm all for small civic organizations at the local level, but some things need to be done at regional and national levels.  Like most leftists, I don't trust Big Government any more than I trust big business.  In principle I believe it's possible to treat large organizations as our creatures, rather than the other way around.  Certainly most people who dismiss the value of large organizations seem to forget just how much they depend on them, every day.  That doesn't mean that I think government at any level is currently responsive to ordinary citizens; of course not.  But the remedy is to make our governments more responsive.

Which brings me to the other passage in The Politics of Volunteering I wanted to mention.

When a student of mine started an essay by saying, "Society makes us do things we would not otherwise do," this sentence was already a mistake.  Without society we would not exist, so there is no "otherwise" [36].

Society, like Soylent Green, is people.  If I think of myself as a discrete, atomized individual, I'm luxuriating in an illusion; the easiest way to recognize it is to remember that from another discrete, atomized individual's point of view, I am "society."  Eliasoph describes Alexis de Tocqueville's conception of society earlier in the book:

He has very little faith in people's innate decency.  People are not born good citizens or bad citizens, good or bad people, caring or uncaring, selfish or altruistic, greedy or generous or generous, passive or active, Tocqueville says.  Their societies train them to be good or bad, in very small, constant, steady, everyday ways: the steady constant drip drip drip that creates canyons and valleys, not a big, one-time splash.  "Common sense" tells us that good people create a good society, but Tocqueville reverses the arrows: a good society creates good individuals [12].

That first sentence reminds me of Paul Goodman's anarchist take on human nature.  I have some reservations about this, of course.  I don't "reverse the arrows," I think that they go both ways.  Good societies make good citizens make good societies: which came first, the chicken or the egg?  It's impossible to separate them.  Also, there is wide variation among citizens: society doesn't train us all uniformly.  Whether this is because of innate temperament or variations in our training -- it's probably some of both -- the fact of variation remains.  If Tocqueville meant to advance a theory of social determinism, he was mistaken.  And a good thing, too.

Eliasoph also describes Tocqueville's belief that American society was more atomized, individualized, and that this was in some ways a loss of the cohesion that came from a traditional "aristocratic" society where everyone had his or her place in the Great Chain of Being.  I agree with this caveat to some extent.  But Tocqueville, Eliasoph says, feared that the individuals of American society might "glue themselves together and massify ... Mob rule, witch hunts, and fanaticism set in" (17).  I don't think "aristocratic" societies avoided this danger: the great European witch hunts had been part of traditional hierarchical societies, for example, run from the top of hierarchies downward.  So had mob violence against minority religions earlier in history.  The same goes for "the tyranny of the majority," a familiar bugbear:

Imagine the person who does not agree with the majority, or can't conform.  If a "tyranny of the majority" develops, the whole society turns into one interminable seventh-grade class in the 1950s, before there were rules against harassment, and you are the gay thirteen-year-old who thinks you are the only oen of his kind on the planet ... In such conditions, democracy vanishes.

Civic associations to the rescue, again!  Where there are plural civic associations, Tocqueville implies, people learn to tolerate opposing views, even if they do not agree with them. ... [17]

Tyranny of the majority, expressed in the pressure to conform, occurs in traditional societies too.  That's how society creates citizens, after all.  And plural civic associations, fostering groupthink, may simply declare war on each other.  I don't think Eliasoph shares Tocqueville's optimism on this point; she's just summarizing it, and she goes on to discuss other models.  I think Tocqueville wasn't entirely wrong, just incomplete.  I'm looking forward to seeing where Eliasoph goes from here.

(I found the title of this post in comments somewhere last week, by the way; I don't remember where.  I think it's wonderful, and I don't to give the impression that I came up with it myself.)

Laugh, and the World Laughs with You

At alicublog this morning, Roy Edroso came perilously close to criticizing President Obama:

The big tax-cut giveaway Obama just announced -- assuming that it accurately portrays the deal with the GOP -- demonstrates one unremarked fact: Republicans don't give a shit about the deficit. No sane person thinks we can even begin to scale that back just with cuts. Yet they just agreed to abandon the easiest route to new revenue, plus Democratic "concessions" that close others.

Whew! I could feel the breeze from the precipice there.

Notice how, in this account, Obama becomes the announcer, sorta like Walter Cronkite; just the messenger, not responsible for the message in any way. And remember how, at the beginning of his administration when his party controlled both houses of Congress, Obama hobbled his stimulus package with tax cuts. Don't buy any claims that Obama had no choice but to surrender to the Republicans because of the midterm elections; he'd have done it anyway.

Now, I check alicublog daily. As I've said before, it's a valuable clearinghouse of right-wing dementia in certain areas, and I'm grateful that Edroso scours the web for this material so I don't have to. But his focus (varied slightly with occasional commentary on the arts, which usually consists mainly of fulminations against right-wing thoughtcrime in that arena ... do I detect a pattern here?) can obscure the fact that his politics are thoroughly mainstream-media. "Republicans don't give a shit about the deficit," he rails. The deficit is an obsession of the corporate media and the Village/Beltway political class, which is one reason they celebrate Bill Clinton, who did eliminate the deficit -- at great cost to most Americans, because in elite discourse the deficit functions as an excuse for cutting and gutting social programs. But there's no reason to believe that most Americans share this obsession. Polls show consistently that the deficit ranks low on our list of concerns, well below the economy and jobs. And there's certainly no reason to believe that Obama or other Democrats give any more of a shit about the deficit than the Republicans do.

In the same vein, Edroso's commentary on Wikileaks focuses on right-wing hysteria about the document dumps, not the Obama administration and its media supporters, who also want Julian Assange's head on a pike; for that you have to go to Glenn Greenwald. On the TSA and the "porno scanners," Edroso was contemptuous of the frenzy ginned up by the Republicans, but failed to notice that liberal Democrats were in on the fun too. And so on.

Thinking about this, I found my copy of sociologist Nina Eliasoph's Avoiding politics: how Americans produce apathy in everyday life (Cambridge UP, 1998). Eliasoph did participant observation of a community in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s (I think -- I need to reread the book), and describes the different ways people dealt with political issues. Some got involved in astroturf "volunteer" groups under the guidance of professionals, some chose more genuinely grassroots forms of activism. Others chose cynicism and disengagement, and the patterns Eliasoph described are familiar to me both from online forums and my experience in that life we call real.

There was a clear formula for treating the rare moments when a topic that could be taken as "serious" arose. It went: a person said something that could be taken as serious. The next thing said had to be a joke: rarely a joke on the topic, but most often, a joke on the speaker herself or himself. The next thing said had to be an even bigger joke that topped off the previous joke. So the pattern was: serious comment, joke on the speaker, bigger joke. If anyone was ever serious in the group context, the two jokes in a row would vanquish that illusion [290 note 15].

To tease each other, people need a shared idea of what is suitable for teasing, so teasing might seem to be a reflection of deeply shared culture. Jokes about being dumb were by far the most frequent (followed by teases about being gay) [106].

This is what she found among the "Buffaloes," the habitues of country and western clubs, but I've encountered it in the gay male community, in gay chatrooms and online in mixed or heterosexual bulletin boards. But the cynics! They're more like the people who populate the comments sections of liberal blogs.

Like private people, they focused on facts when discussing politics. But unlike the private people, they were data hounds. Sniffing out grim facts was a form of self-protection for them...

Unlike the mainstream country-westerners, the cynics were confident enough in their own intellectual abilities to assume that their ignorance comes from factors like government secrecy and the power of moneyed interests, not from their own lack of intellectual abilities. As citizens, the cynics knew that they were supposed to have a say in politics and that political problems affect the way people think and live. The cynical Buffaloes would never just flatly state that they have no say in the workings of our government, as the majority of the country-westerners did. The cynics, unlike the other Buffaloes, held an ideal of political life, but assumed that the ideal was unattainable in today's world [163].

Not all the commenters at alicublog are cynics in this mode, of course. Some are active Democratic party members, some are involved in progressive and left activism. But the tone of cynicism set by the postings infects a lot of the discussion. The Republican gains of November make it all the easier to focus on their malevolence, and to give Obama an even freer ride than he's enjoyed so far from the Democratic blogosphere. There's nothing wrong per se with Edroso's tunnel vision and personal bias; I love bias, and have plenty of my own. The Republicans are scum, and it's true, they don't really care about the deficit or unemployment or any of the other problems that ordinary Americans face. But neither does Obama, who gets more out of touch the longer he's in office, and who seems to be retreating farther from reality as conditions get worse for the rest of us.