There
is a very old and venerable religion that enjoys considerable currency amongst
the nation’s elite. It is the theology of the “economic mover,” the benevolent
despot whose unsurpassed wisdom in economic affairs keeps the world spinning on
its axis. If it were not for a pantheon of such gray-eyed men – and the odd
woman or two – the international economy would cease to exist as we know it:
markets would crash, stocks would plummet, and the human-race would be sent
back into the Dark Ages. Like Atlas, these stern but publicly-minded demigods
are the shoulders upon which modern life rests. With knowing forbearance they
sort out the messes made by the rude, innumerate masses; the velocity of money
can be divined with their crystal balls; inflation is kept in check through use
of their mysterious spells; and excessive spending on the poor is disciplined
with the iron rods of austerity and structural adjustment. Their names are
embossed on public monuments, universities and buildings. “Rockefeller, Morgan,
Carnegie, Stanford…” they are names that inspire awe as they slip off the
tongue; names that are meant to be whispered, inscribed, praised, rather than
simply spoken.
Today’s economic movers are found in
the pages of Fortune 500. Rather than assuming the stiff demeanor of a
Victorian banker they tend to wear the sleek, modish outfit of a tech
entrepreneur, or, if more conservative, fitted suits with designer shoes.
“Knight, Jobs, Gates, Zuckerman…” their names grace the pages of ‘The Wall Street
Journal’; a few, such as Zuckerman and Jobs, have even gained mortality on the
silver screen.
But the capitalist theology which they
embody is ultimately a morally bankrupt one. It is a religion of dollars and
cents, and a rather peculiar one at that. Instead of collecting money to help
the poor, money is collected before being redistributed to the top – this being
the core tenet of the capitalist
creed: the accumulation of surplus value. And the forgotten masses are supposed
to celebrate this state of unnatural inequality. (Though perhaps all the hoorah
is part of a subconscious effort to salve their own consciences with white
noise, to insulate them from the misery they are creating – like a separation
wall – and buttress their delusions with evidence as artificial as the GMOs they
peddle.) In a world of symbols, of dollars and cents, the “economic movers” are
the symbols of modern capitalism; icons splashed across the agitprop of the
corporate state; the essence of a system whose soul is thin as the paper money on
which it is printed.
But the staying power of this
propaganda should not be underestimated: after decades of increasing inequality
and multiple recessions, producers of intelligent opinion still profess faith
in the theology of the “economic mover”. If anything, however, the Great
Recession has disproved the “economic mover” thesis in spades: the international
economy was shaken not in spite of these “movers,” but because of their
malfeasance and greed. Indeed, the past several years has shown that the main types
of “movement” produced by these “movers” is the collapse of sweatshops (as in
Bangladesh) onto workers, and the eviction of American families from their
homes. And I would be remiss if not to mention the relentless “movement” of the
nation’s wealth from the hands of the 99% to the tax havens, portfolios, and
bank accounts of the 1%.
________
In Oregon, the theology of the economic
mover is most ardently espoused by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. The Nike
brand is a religion unto itself, its ubiquitous Swoosh likely enjoying more
recognition than the cross in the post-Christian West. Besides being suffused
with quasi-religious iconography, the company also has its own golden rule:
“Just do it.” In 21st century America, this maxim translates as
follows: buy, buy, buy. Thinking about what you purchase is, of course,
unnecessary; it is the act itself that matters. With an “economic-mover” like
Knight at the helm, the rest of society does not need to think; they just need
to listen, to follow; to do as they are told. “Just do it.” Thus, with faintly
Orwellian overtones, Nike sets out to capture markets, control the cheapest
labor, and monopolize the industry. Its single-minded aim is victory – as its
name implies – and if a few eggs are broken in the process, this is of no
concern. After all, they have decided to “Just do it”.
What makes the case of Knight
noteworthy, though, is his eagerness to play the part of the far-sighted mogul,
the towering philanthropist whose uncanny insights and self-denial balm society’s
ills and uplift the poor. His and his wife’s recent pledge of $500 million to
cancer research – that is, if Oregonians can raise matching funds – is just one
example of such staged self-sacrifice (or should we say self-adulation?). Just
as with their famous shoes, the Knight’s love to advertise their philanthropy.
Much the same can be said about Knight’s
favorite pet-project, the University of Oregon. As students face soaring
tuition rates, classrooms fall apart, and teachers are sloughed off like a dead
snake skin, Knight has channeled his money into what is obviously the most
pressing issue at the school: building a new football operations center. The
new facility boasts 64 television screens, a 45 foot ceiling and imported
construction materials – and this is just the entrance. To “rid the body of
waste-products,” twin 40-foot long pools were built (with variable water
temperatures, of course) for the athletes; a 170-seat movie theater allows
football players to engage in serious “study”; and a state-of-the-art kitchen with
a chef-nutritionist caters to each player’s diet. Across the river, where
actual students go to school, the campus faces $105 million in lagging
maintenance costs. As Diane Dietz reports for ‘The Register-Guard,’ this sum
will grow to $291 million within the next decade.
If one is inclined to dismiss such
ostentation as an unusual lapse in Knight’s good judgment, it is worth
remembering his last “contribution” to the university: the Jaqua Center, a
study hall built exclusively for student athletes. The Jaqua Center – or the
Taj Mahal, as it is referred to by the student majority who is forbidden from using
it – has an entirely glass façade, Italian-leather sofas, and cost a cool $42
million to construct. According to ‘The Oregonian,’ this means that the
building “cost about twice as much per square foot as Portland's priciest condo
buildings”. Apparently student athletes were too good, delicate, or stupid for
the preexisting study centers on campus. Within its first two years of
operation the building already began to experience serious water damage. And
there is no evidence that the building fulfills any service that is not
rendered elsewhere on campus – that is, besides providing the local fowl a massive
reflection pool to play in.
________
Recently, Knight has been playing the
“economic mover” card with special insistence. In fact, sources claim that he
was a driving force behind the creation of the newly inaugurated “independent” governing
boards, semi-private school boards separate from the Oregon Board of Higher
Education. Why would Knight lobby for more independent – i.e., private – influence
over the University of Oregon? The answer is straightforward: he wants more
control over how the university is run, instead of having to pay attention to
the will of the pesky public. At present, public schools are, well, public. That
means they are legally obligated to respect the wishes of Oregonians in
general, rather than run by elite fiat. By adopting a governance system that is
more open to private interference, however, Knight can more easily leverage his
“philanthropy” in order get his policies of choice enacted – even over the will
of the public.
This is disturbing for several reasons,
not the least of which being the fact that most of the “contributions” Knight
has made to the university have been motivated by thinly veiled self-interest.
To Knight, the university is one big marketing scheme, a chance to immortalize
his name and peddle the Nike brand. This is why every recent “contribution” has
been to sports facilities – the basketball arena, football operations center,
and Jaqua Center – which invariably use Nike products, and have obvious commercial
value. Televised sports coverage allows the Swoosh to proselytize consumers
across the country; the Swoosh has a prominent role in university publications;
and through these avenues Nike corners a large chunk of the collegiate sports
market.
Knight’s record exemplifies the
tendency amongst “economic movers” to make “contributions” not on the basis of
public need, but, rather, on the basis of narrow self-interest. This is one of
the big flaws of the economic mover thesis. Economic movers generally fail to
advocate coherent policies which help the public at large because their
motives, priorities and vision are conditioned by the prejudices of their
class. So while they may pour millions into pet projects, these projects are
often of dubious value. The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, for instance, was
famous for erecting libraries, but his libraries were often empty. His workers
were forced to labor for such long stints – sometimes over 24 hours – they did
not have time to read.
Much the same can be said of Knight.
Movie theaters, Italian-leather sofas, and personal chefs are frivolous
investments that do not benefit anyone except for the clique who uses them, and
the interests whom they serve; that is, Knight Inc. That Knight did not foresee
that such expenditures – during the Great Recession and a student debt crisis –
were in very poor taste, is perhaps the strongest indicator of just how
removed he is from the needs of the average student. Indeed, anyone who can
convince themselves that they “deserve,” or are wise enough to handle $16.8
billion – Knight’s net worth – is either too foolish or conceited to be trusted
with serious policy-making.
________
And it is worth asking how Knight came
to be rolling in dough in the first place. The problem with the economic mover
is the problem with capitalism: it relies on extracting more value from
workers than what they are rewarded for their work. This is, in fact, what makes
the principle of profit possible; if workers were fully rewarded for all the
labor they put into their work then the accumulation of profit would be
impossible. In practice, this has meant: one, squeezing the most labor power
possible out of workers during working hours; two, deskilling work in order to
make each worker easier to replace; and three, pushing wages down as low as
possible by exploiting the most vulnerable labor pools (usually by
“outsourcing”).
This is precisely how Nike managed to become a
heavyweight in the textile industry. Like other clothing-makers, the company
manufactures its clothes in countries where sweatshops are the norm. Here safety
regulations are often disregarded and labor laws violated. Sometimes Nike has
even paid private militias to protect its business interests. In short, the
theme of Nike work is bad pay and bad conditions. As a ‘Labor Notes’ article
(“Nike’s Love Affair with Sweatshops: Still Doing It”) on Gina Cano and Lowlee
Urquía, two Honduran sweatshop workers, explains, the company breaks labor laws:
“The
two women represented more than 1,700 workers who are owed $2.2 million in
severance pay [after a sudden factory closure]. The workers are also owed
health care premiums, which were deducted from their wages but never paid to
the health care system. This meant that workers could not access health care in
the four months before the closure. At least one worker, who had been receiving
cancer treatment, died because of this denial of care, according to Cano and
Urquía.”
The collapse of Rana Plaza and the Savar
building site – the deadliest garment factory incident in history – this year,
underscore the fact that the life of the modern garment worker is as bad as it
has ever been. In an era of great wealth, when student athletes study on
Italian leather sofas, there is no good reason for this to be the case. Besides
raising ethical questions about capitalism in general, these developments pose
another question: should the University of Oregon accept the “contributions” of
Knight, a known human rights violator, since he “earned” this wealth by
stealing it from poor people? And the reader should consider just how ridiculous
the entire situation is: families are starved, brutalized, and broken so that
Nike – a company that ironically champions sports participation in the Third
World – can build garish monuments to the sacred Swoosh. As in the case of
Carnegie’s libraries, Knight may give athletic equipment to the poor, but in the
long-run his “contributions” are not helpful. After all, these children are too
busy sewing the Swooshes in his sweatshops to have a childhood, let alone play
sports.
________
Lastly, it is important to note that
the crimes of Knight reflect the criminality of capitalism in general. One can
spend all day (rightly) chiding Knight for his misplaced priorities, but the
capitalist system within which we all live is based on similar distortions. It
is a system that reduces human life to a brute means to an end, and puts the
accumulation of profit over the well-being of the planet. It is one which
reveres money – a literal “means” of exchange – as the ultimate “end,” even over
the well-being of humanity, the “end” it is supposed to serve. This is ironic, and
in bad taste, seeing as the value of money only comes from human labor; in other
words, humanity is the real “end” or source of value, even if we are to use
capitalism’s confused logic. The problem we face is thus one of disconnect, blindness;
to forget that the economy is meant to serve humans, not humans the economy.
In a world of misplaced priorities, it
is thus important to redeem the truths that have been hidden and to reevaluate
our priorities; to rectify the language. The first step towards this goal is to
take back the philosophical truths that capitalists have hidden, distorted or perverted
for their own. In the West, for example, Christianity has long been used to
justify capitalism, despite the fact that the teachings of Jesus are inimical
to the status quo. There are several basic points that I would like to
emphasize along this vein:
Firstly, the Bible is emphatic about
the injustice of poverty, and the corruption that great wealth engenders. For
conservative “Christians” to blame the poor for their poverty is not only
stupid – the idea is a tautology – but to deny the Bible itself. Ecclesiastes chapter
five, for example, directly links the suffering of the poor to the greed of the
rich, noting that “If you see the poor oppressed… and justice and rights
denied, do not be surprised”. The chapter goes on to explain that “Whoever
loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied
with his income. This too is meaningless,” before noting “a grievous evil
under the sun: wealth hoarded”. For “Christians” to suppose that the poor are
less morally fit is consequently unchristian. After all, Jesus was born into poverty
and stayed poor his entire life. The people he ridiculed in his teachings were usually the Pharisees and religious elite – in other words, the rich people.
Secondly, the predatory lending schemes
and debt bondage that exist today are unbiblical. In other words, the modern
financial system – one marked by hedge funds, predatory lending, and the spread
of debt-based securities – should be opposed by Christians. In Deuteronomy the
Israelites are commanded to forgive each other their debts every seven years, and
Psalms 15 notes that the person who follows God “lends his [or her] money
without usury.” It is also worth noting that the only time Jesus is recorded as
using force is when he drives the money-lenders out of the temple.
The existence of financial institutions
like the Word Bank and IMF, which lend money to poor countries on onerous
terms, makes God sick. It is worth noting that the raison d’être of these institutions
is to provide financial support and liquidity to poor countries, yet they still
choose to operate for a profit. In other words, they choose to benefit from the
suffering of the most vulnerable members of human society. Almost half of the
national budget of countries like the Philippines, for instance, has gone to
paying just the interest on such debts. And most of the time the “structural
adjustment” plans agreed upon as a precondition for these loans is based on the
exploitation of cheap labor with foreign capital. Put another
way, the “development” plans take advantage of poverty, i.e., low wage levels.
Poverty is built into the system.
And, of course, many of these countries – like the Philippines, Vietnam, and
Honduras – are poor because of the legacy of Western imperialism. In other words,
they are penalized for having been exploited in the past – by the very same
people.
Thirdly, the Bible does not support a
laissez-faire approach to poverty, especially if this means killing government
programs that would help the poor. The current notion – much in vogue – that
poverty should be left to the private sector or churches is not only
unpractical but unbiblical. In Deuteronomy, for instance, the Israelites are
commanded to levy a tax in support of
the poor. It is also clear that Jesus would not see the tax obligations of the
rich as unduly burdensome. This is a significant point because many
self-identified “Christians” claim that the rich should only be taxed the same
percentage of their income as the working-class. In fact, Jesus explicitly
states that the contributions of the less wealthy, even if smaller, are greater
than those of the rich. Because this is a sensitive point, it is worth citing
the relevant passage at length:
“As he looked up, Jesus saw the rich
putting their gifts into the temple treasury. He also saw a poor widow put in
two very small copper coins. ‘I tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘this poor widow
has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of
their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.’” (Luke
21:1-4).
Since Jesus states that the
lady who gave “out of… poverty” gave “more” than the rich, the notion that the
rich assume an undue share of the tax burden seems wrong. For Obama and the
nation’s political elite to champion the principle of “shared sacrifice” may
very well be unchristian. In Jesus’ eyes, at least, a sacrifice is hardly “shared”
if some people are forced to give “out of… poverty” while the “sacrifice” of
others only amounts to shifting around some numbers in their checkbook. One
person feels their “sacrifice” in the form of hunger pains, insecurity and hopelessness.
The other person just gets peeved – that is, if they even learn of the
difference.
And lastly, rich people who claim to be
Christians are commanded to share their wealth. The idea of the “economic mover”
is not biblical, and, in fact, the Bible has far more warnings against the
trappings of wealth than perhaps any other evil. 1 Timothy 6:9-10 states that “People
who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and
harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of
money is a root of all kinds of evil…” Later in the chapter, Paul tells Timothy
to “Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to
put their hope in wealth…. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds,
and to be generous and willing to share.” The idea that the rich are somehow
more deserving or far-sighted than the poor is completely foreign to Christian
philosophy.
Christianity is an anti-Establishment
religion. It teaches that the world is divided by sin, the powerful are usually
corrupt, and the poor are always exploited. If the status quo is screwed up, as
the Bible claims, then it seems decidedly unchristian for “Christians” to
champion the system that is, in fact, the status quo. Instead, Christians should
be very skeptical of capitalism, with its theology of the “economic mover” and
sublimation of greed. Above all, they should fight for the poor, and be willing
to give what they have to help those in need. What they have is not their own,
it is God’s, so they better be wise about how they use it.
________
The hero worship and corporate
allegiance that accompanies capitalism is interesting to behold. Commercials
pop-up on the television screen and tell you what to buy; they dot the computer
screen and tell you what you need to be happy; they fill the air-waves and even
line the roads, overwhelming the senses until you don’t even notice them
anymore. They become a part of you. “Are you a Mac or a PC?” they ask. Which
corporation will you sell your soul too? They both are congenital polluters, wage-slavers,
and poverty-makers, but oh, they are so different! Which one is bigger, better,
sleeker, more youthful, sexier, intelligent… So which one are you?
And there are so many choices to make. There
is no time to think, only time to do; to react. “Just do it.” Mildly amused, the parents watch their children run about in childhood bliss. Their rock collections,
trading cards, postcards all seem so insignificant to the grown-ups. The
adults, of course, have matured: they have dedicated their lives to collecting
green paper, the more the better. Some will even kill for it. They have chosen.
Or perhaps most has been chosen for them. Born into poverty, the dollar acquires
different significance: the difference between a meal and going hungry, keeping
your home or losing it, taking the baby to the doctor or…
Rising from the bottom to the top, we
encounter the knowers, the economic movers, those rich enough to live out their
own delusions. They enjoy charades. The poor are poor because they are poor;
they want to stay that way. Welfare aid (aside: welfare is, by definition,
meant to provide aid to those without work)
should only go to those who are working. If they don’t work they should not get
aid for those who don’t work. It’s simple math, we are proportionally smarter
and harder working than everyone else and deserve to be compensated accordingly.
Yes, even if our salaries are three-hundred times that of our workers. Of
course we work three-hundred times harder!
Oh, it’s time for my meeting with the
chamber of commerce. We’ve got to prevent those communists from trying to
unionize downtown. “Family wage” my ***! If they are so poor they just shouldn’t
have babies. They’re like rats you know…
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