I Heartily Concur: Benjamin Barber

Dr. Benjamin Barber's new book, Consumed, just shot to the top of my must-read list (I think I'll check it out from the library instead of buying it, though). Here's an excerpt from an interview with Bill Moyers:

"Part of the problem here is that the capitalist companies have figured out that the best way to do their job is to privatize profit, but socialize risk. That is to say, ask the taxpayer to pay for it when things go down. The banks now that have just screwed up so big, not one of those banks is going to go under because they'll be bailed out by the feds. 'Cause the feds, the federal government will say we can't afford this gigantic multi billion dollar bank to go under. Happened with Chrysler 20, 30 years ago. And, therefore, it's impossible to fail if you're a business. You never get punished. Now the whole point of profit is to reward risk. But what we've done today is socialize risk. You and I, and all of your listeners out there, pay when companies like sub-prime market mortgage companies and the banks go bad. We pay for it. They don't.

Now, he's simplifying things a bit; it is possible to fail if you're a small or medium business. It's just the huge corporations that get shielded by the government, and not even all of those (ask Enron or Andersen Consulting), but overall I think his point is dead on. In fact, I was just saying the same thing to Daryl in my best cranky-old-man voice the other day. "Companies these days," I said, "there's no risk of failure for screwing up or doing something wrong!" It's not just the sub-prime screw-up, it's all the lead in children's toys, too. And (As I mentioned last week) it's the energy bill, too. Are there any substantive penalties for the car manufacturers not reaching the new emissions levels outlined in the bill? I seriously doubt it.

Barber has a history of getting it right before the fact. His best-known book, Jihad vs. McWorld, was eerily prescient. As New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote, it "depicted the post-cold-war world as a place simultaneously subject to the fragmenting forces of religious and ethnic fundamentalism and the homogenizing forces of global capitalism: forces, he suggested, that were threats to democracy, and that were on a dangerous collision course with each other." That's easy for us to see now, but Barber wrote that in 1995.

The whole interview with Barber is worth watching or reading. Here are a few more of his insights:

* "Capitalism is no longer manufacturing goods to meet real needs and human wants. It's manufacturing needs to sell us all the goods it's got to produce."

* "Here in the United States, the cola companies, which couldn't sell enough cola, figure out, why sell cola when we can sell water from the tap that people can get for free, but we'll sell it in bottles from the tap? Twenty billion a year. Twenty billion dollars a year in bottled water. In the third world there are literally billions without potable, without drinkable, without clean water. Now why shouldn't capitalism figure out how to clean the water out there and get people something they need and make a buck off it? Because that's what capitalism does. It makes a profit off taking some chances and meeting real human needs, instead of convincing Americans and Europeans that they shouldn't drink pure clean tap water but instead pay two bucks a bottle for it."

* "Capitalism cannot stay indefinitely in business trying to manufacture needs for people in the middle class and the developed world who have most of what they need. It has to figure out how to address the real needs of people."

* "Capitalism has put democracy in trouble, because capitalism has tried to persuade us that being a private consumer is enough. That a citizen is nothing more than a consumer. That voting means spending your dollars spreading around your private prejudices, your private preferences. Not reaching public judgments. Not finding common ground. Not making decisions about the social consequences of private judgments, but just making the private judgments and letting it fall where it will."

* "As Americans, I would think we understand that, above all, democracy means pluralism. If everything's religion, we rightly distrust it. If everything's politics, even in good politics, we rightly distrust it. But when everything's marketing, and everything's retail, and everything's shopping, we somehow think that enhances our freedom. Well, it doesn't. It has the same corrupting effect on the fundamental diversity and variety that are our lives that make us human, that make us happy."

* "So many of our choices today are trivial. We feel that we're expanding and enhancing our choice, but the big choices, a green environment, a safe city for our kids, good education, simply, are not available through private consumer choices."

* "We're on the wrong end of globalization...the US is selling itself, China's buying. China is buying into the global market. America is selling itself out in that global market."

* "we've got to retrieve our citizenship. We can't buy the line that government is our enemy and the market is our friend. We used to say government can do everything, the market can do nothing. That was a mistake. But now we seem to say the market can do everything and government can do nothing. Government is us. Government is our institutions. Government is how we make social and public choices working together. We've got to retrieve our citizenship."