Unregulated Capitalism Research Articles

Wealth and history: A reappraisal

The study revisits trends and drivers of wealth inequality and accumulation since the onset of industrialization. Empirical analysis reveals that Western countries are both wealthier and more equal today than a century ago. Wealth concentration has declined in all countries over the past century, remaining at historically low levels in Europe, while rising in the United States. These trends are largely driven by new wealth accumulation among the lower and middle classes, primarily through housing and pension savings, rather than a decline in the fortunes of the affluent. The findings challenge the view that unregulated capitalism inevitably leads to extreme wealth concentration and question the idea that wealth equalization requires shocks to capital, such as wars or progressive taxation. Instead, the evidence emphasizes the equitable effects of economic and political institutions that enable ordinary individuals to build personal wealth.

Superstitions of composure: the Ayn Rand cult and the pop-psychology of self-esteem.

Ayn Rand is known as an advocate of rugged individualism and unregulated capitalism, which has led to a scholarly focus on her influence on neoliberal and right-wing politics. This article focuses on the psychologically unrealistic conceptualisation of self-esteem in Rand's ethics, which arguably prevails in today's self-help culture. Rand endorsed Nathaniel Branden, her acolyte and lover, as official therapist for her circle. In this role, he promoted the positive effects of living according to Randian principles on mental health. Rand's so-called objectivism therefore provides not only a questionable philosophical framework for neoliberal politics but also, and perhaps predominantly for its followers, a set of guidelines for the project of self-optimisation. The fact that Rand's ideal of radical self-sufficiency is ultimately psychologically unliveable makes its use in applied psychotherapy ineffective and harmful. The article offers a cultural-historical case study about the ideological entanglements of philosophy and pop-psychological concepts and of clinical malpractice.

Гендерные стереотипы в романах Айн Рэнд

Ayn Rand, a 20th-century American writer and philosopher of the Russian origin, known to a wide range of readers as the author of the bestseller “Atlas Shrugged”, raises a number of socially significant issues in her novels. The key concepts in her author’s philosophy of objectivism, embodied in literary works, are the concepts of unregulated capitalism and the morality of rational egoism, which received a comprehensive analysis and various assessments in critical literature. However, along with these main themes, A. Rand touches on a number of peripheral issues arising from them, such as the gender problem. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the inconsistency of A. Rand’s philosophy by the example of her interpretation of the gender problem. The scientific novelty lies in the appeal to a problem that has been little studied in A. Rand’s work earlier. The results obtained have shown that A. Rand’s interpretation of the gender problem is in line with her controversial philosophical views.

Towards an evaluation of the nexus between unfettered, unregulated capitalism, donor aid and debt relief inconsistencies, and the problem of post-election violence in Kenya

ABSTRACT Although internal structural factors in emerging democracies and factors related to the electoral process and contest remain indispensable in understanding post-election violence, they are not sufficient in an era of full-fledged neoliberal globalisation, enshrined in the Washington Consensus and the productivist development model enforced by the World Bank. Accordingly, this paper approaches electoral violence in Africa through the lens of unfettered, unregulated capitalism. Based on insights from Belgian historian Éric Toussaint, it assumes the posture that violent contestation of state power, in Kenya, is also indicative of the insatiable pursuit of profit, by global capitalists. Grounded in historical data from Human Rights Watch annual reports (1991–2008), it tests, through Kenya’s first four multiparty elections conducted during the Moi and Kibaki eras, covering the period 1992–2007, the hypothesis that ‘Aid and debt relief inconsistencies by donors and international financial institutions have emboldened the Kenyan government to disregard human rights, leading to impunity, which has yielded post-election violence’. It finds, partly, that ‘donors seem willing to countenance harassment and intimidation of the Kenyan government’s critics as long as the government continues to liberalize the economy and retain a multiparty system in name’, an element that could also explain post-election violence.

The Adivasi and the undead: From (post)colonial carnage to Necrocene apocalypse in Betaal (2020)

ABSTRACT In conversation with work by Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy and Jason W. Moore, this article shows how the 2020 Indian Netflix zombie miniseries Betaal aligns British colonial-capitalist oppression with the neocolonial-capitalist violence performed by Indian soldiers on India’s indigenous Adivasi community. Merging the (post)colonial with the post-apocalyptic in spectacular and violent ways, Betaal tells the story of elimination of an Adivasi community that resists capitalist exploitation of their lands, accidentally releasing a pandemic in the form of undead British soldiers once in the employ of the East India Company. The extractive violence that these two entities perform destroys not only people and traditions, it exhausts the land itself and can thus be considered an element of what Justin McBrien calls “the Necrocene”. The zombie pandemic that erupts in Betaal is an attempt to render the apocalyptic violence and death that unregulated capitalism performs on ecology and precarious communities.

A Long Look Ahead: William L. Bray and Early Texas Conservationism

A Long Look Ahead: William L. Bray and Early Texas Conservationism Char Miller (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Ecologist William L. Bray (1865–1953) was an expert on the vegetation of western Texas and one of the state’s first conservationists; he taught at the University of Texas and Syracuse University. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 90-105, Science Service Records, Image No. SIA2008-0060. William L. Bray seemed called to the Edwards Plateau, the dominant landform in Central Texas. Not in the religious sense, exactly. He was botanist, not a minister. But the vast, uplifted, and semi-arid terrain was the scene of some of his most important work, research he approached with special fervor. The wellspring of his fervency was at once spiritual and scientific. Bray noted this link in an address at the May 1925 dedication of the University of Texas’s new Biological Laboratories Building: “It is unthinkable that a universe so vast, so wonderful, so beautiful, so orderly, and that a creature with power to discern and appreciate all this, should be matters of chance or without motive.” However centering Bray’s Christian faith was, its focus was “turned to the business of right living and acting in this present,” a social gospel that led Bray to pursue the “betterment of human environment and of social conditions.”1 Science thus played a formative role in shaping human affairs. For Bray, this meant that botany had utility, that it should be of use to society, an argument he had announced in his dissertation. Assessing “plant life in Texas as the product of its environment,” he wrote approvingly, “lies in the growing tendency to rely upon such study to furnish a rational basis for the exploitation of plant life in agriculture, horticulture, forestry, [End Page 251] agrostology, and various other economic fields.”2 Bray made the same case twenty-seven years later at the grand opening of the university’s new laboratory. Botanists, he argued, were “concerned in what way the plant world can be induced to yield toward material human welfare.”3 That was why he was deeply interested in the “practical benefits to the people of the State growing out of the service of botanical science,” a concept the title of his address highlighted: “Botany and the State.”4 Bray’s utilitarian perspective was consistent with the defining values of his academic discipline, its professional ethos and social advocacy. Established in 1894, the Botanical Society of America promoted botanical research in American universities and colleges that would be linked to the demands of industrial capitalism, affirmed the priority of academic expertise over amateurism, and publicly supported the creation of forest reserves as part of its utilitarian credo.5 Bray embodied these professionalizing commitments during his decade-long career at the University of Texas, from 1897 to 1907. While there, he mounted a series of robust botanical investigations and rigorous ecological analyses of two regions in the state led him to develop a sophisticated set of policy recommendations for their careful, scientific management. In particular, he made a strong case for the immediate application of conservation measures to control natural-resource exploitation on the Edwards Plateau of Central Texas and in the Piney Woods of East Texas to insure these regions’ ecological stability and economic productivity across time. Bray, in short, emerged as the leading academic advocate for the implementation of a state or national regulatory presence on the ground. He had no doubt such oversight of unregulated capitalism was necessary, even if little directly came of his convictions. Bray’s zeal was manifest in his man-on-a-mission approach to life. Born [End Page 252] in Burnside, Illinois, in September 1865, the ninth of thirteen children born to William and Martha Bray, he was educated in local public schools. After high school, Bray earned a teaching degree at Missouri’s Kirkland Normal School (now Truman State University) and spent the next set of years as a teacher and administrator in Iowa and Missouri. Showing his inclination toward the social gospel, he took a twelve-month leave to direct the YMCA in Fresno, California. During his free time, the...

Elements, origins and future of Great Transformations: Eastern Europe and global capitalism

AbstractThis essay analyses the relationship of two ‘Great Transformations’: the first from socialism to capitalism, more specifically in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, and the second from regulated to unregulated capitalism in the global economy since the 1980s, with respect to their common origins, elements and social results. Applying Karl Polanyi’s double-movement concept, it is concluded that these two, in essence neoliberal, transformations have led to societies being deeply divided economically, socially and culturally. Moreover, the self-protection of transformation losers is generating adverse political outcomes on a global scale. For both reasons, the outcomes of neoliberal transformations are jeopardising also the viability of the European Union, which was initially built on the basis of a regulated capitalism. The future of the global economy and also of the European Union depends on how the conflicts between the deepening of unregulated globalisation, national sovereignty and democratic politics can be solved.

Biblical Studies, COVID-19, and Our Response to Growing Inequality

Biblical Studies, COVID-19, and Our Response to Growing Inequality Roger S. Nam SBL promotes the academic study of biblical texts to foster the understanding of religion and to cultivate empathy in our diverse world. —Society of Biblical Literature1 Our interpretations of what it means “to cultivate empathy in our diverse world” have surely shifted since the beginnings of the present pandemic. This brief essay will explore the potential impact of COVID-19 on our guild, particularly as it relates to the growing inequality made stark in recent events. As a comparison, I will present a summative review of shifts in the field of economics in light of the 2008–2009 Great Recession and the 2020 pandemic. This review will propel a self-reflective question: How will the biblical studies scholarly communities respond to the experiences of COVID-19? As an academic society, we may choose to ignore the inequalities magnified by the pandemic and reify the existing norms of our field. Or perhaps these events can catalyze the beginnings of a transformation to more profound societal impact congruent with our official statement. I propose that the tragic pandemic and its racialized responses can compel biblical scholars to renew our commitments to mediate between texts and reading communities, particularly in the face of endemic patterns of inequality. By doing so, we may more effectively abide by our own stated mission to cultivate empathy. COVID-19 has negatively affected people across different economic classes, with the greatest devastation on underprivileged populations. The economic burden of COVID-19 falls more heavily on those with less access to resources, access that is both racialized and gendered. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declares, “There is increasing evidence that some racial and ethnic [End Page 600] minority groups are disproportionately affected by COVID-19.”2 African Americans have much higher contraction rates and death rates of COVID-19.3 The impact is further seen in the outbreaks in incarcerated populations and the disparity of resources in education across underprivileged school districts under lock-down. In contrast to prior recessions, the social distancing shutdowns harm women employees more than men.4 With the closures of schools and concomitant disruption in household labor, such gender disparity will surely continue through the life of the pandemic. These disruptions have brought further precarity to the most vulnerable, who have limited options to shelter in place and face increased challenges with food insecurity. The economic repercussions of increased racialized violence stemming from COVID-19 are substantial though difficult to quantify. As COVID-19 has delivered an unprecedented shock to the global economies, it will surely generate major changes in the field of economics. As a biblical scholar interested in wider economic systems, I am observing the various reactions to this pandemic. When I majored in economics as an undergraduate in the 1990s, the field was still deep in the neoliberalism characterized by scholars such as Milton Friedman, who provided theoretical support for the laissez-faire policies of influential politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Grossly oversimplified, this period advocated for fewer government controls and the promise of capitalism in generating broad societal wealth across all classes.5 This flourishing [End Page 601] of neoliberalism was tied to the Cold War discourses, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and broad disdain for government interventions. This neoliberal tendenz is reflected in the revisions of the standard textbook, Paul Samuelson’s Economics, which dominated introductory economics classes for five decades and is still one of the most successful textbooks of all time.6 The book was first published in 1948 and appropriately reflected Samuelson’s own advocacy for a Keynesian approach to interventions aimed at market failures.7 In later revisions, including the 13th edition (1989) assigned to me as an undergraduate, Samuelson and new coauthor William Nordhaus were distancing themselves from Keyesian interventions as a general norm.8 The Great Recession of 2008–2009 generated a different line of thought in regard to economic neoliberalism. Politicians targeted economists for their failure to predict this crisis. A group of economists began to question the merits of unregulated capitalism, using growing inequality as evidence. Advocates for intervention emerged, labeled...

The Representation of Indonesian Migrant Workers in Contemporary Indonesian Literature

Indonesia has a large number of overseas workers varying from professional workers to the unskilled, legal and illegal who take up work across the globe. In the public consciousness this group is characterized as taking considerable risk but can gain considerable financial reward. This paper will examine the theme of Indonesian migrant workers’ risks and rewards and a sense of belonging as represented in contemporary Indonesian short stories from 1992 to 2015. The paper draws upon the theory of narratology to analyze the representation of Indonesian migrant workers in six Indonesian short stories, three from the New Order Period and three from the Reformation era period. The stories themselves have been published in newspapers, magazines and anthologies. The sample has been chosen to represent a range of migrant worker experiences both in Indonesia and abroad, male and female, and skilled and unskilled. The paper finds that the representations of migrant worker’s sense of belonging is particular marked by gender and class differences. Women are depicted over the two periods as the victims of a patriarchal ideology and unregulated capitalism which leads to exploitation, abuse and alienation of working-class women. While the representation of migrant worker experiences is largely similar there are changes over the two periods in terms of contesting the ideologies of patriarchy and New Order developmentalism.

Neoliberalismo y neoautoritarismo

Con la crisis que estalló en el mercado financiero en 2008, muchos científicos sociales diagnosticaron un creciente “malestar en la globalización” (Stiglitz, 2007). Este malestar trajo asociados, junto con los padecimientos que provoca directamente la crisis económica, una serie de fenómenos muy diferentes: el resurgimiento del nacionalismo, la ruptura de pactos de solidaridad institucionalizados, la lucha en torno a la legitimidad del estado de bienestar, la creciente influencia de discursos públicos y partidos políticos racistas, la movilización política de la xenofobia, una nueva oleada de críticas a las desigualdades sociales, así como nuevas demandas de protección social orientadas a contener los efectos más dañinos del capitalismo desregulado. La hipótesis que quisiera defender en este trabajo afirma que, en el contexto de este malestar con la globalización, se han consolidado nuevas formas de autoritarismo social que constituyen una constelación específica de fenómenos, y que precisan ser investigados en su particularidad.

Kazuo Ishiguro and the Remains of Empire

ABSTRACTHaving won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro’s international status is more secure than ever. The prestige of this prize, however, serves to shore up its own institutional capital, citing Ishiguro’s allegedly universal humanism to do so while belying the kind of critical work that his novels actually carry out. This essay reads When We Were Orphans (2000), set between the turn of the twentieth century and the Second World War and focused on the opium trade in Shanghai, to show how the novel critically engages with the neocolonial conditions of its present. Read in light of Paul Gilroy’s notion of “postcolonial melancholia,” I argue that Ishiguro’s novel intervenes in the economic abuses afforded by unregulated multinational capitalism—structures that reflect the continuing legacies of colonialism itself—and that, ultimately, the novel locates alternative future forms of international belonging from within the degradations of an exploitative colonial history.

The Limited Persuasiveness of the Neoliberal Ideology

During the last three decades the basic neoliberal positions remain dominant and comprise the main directions for policy-making in the majority of advanced countries. The central pillars of neoliberalism are the market and the individual, while the basic neoliberal objective is “the retreat of the public boundaries”, on the basis that unregulated capitalism in the market is more effective towards growth and general prosperity. In other words, the economy, according to neoliberal thinkers, operates more efficiently without governmental interventions. While unregulated market capitalism is effective and leads to economic growth and expanded prosperity, public intervention undermine individual initiative and discourage entrepreneurship. Thus, governmental intervention, even if it possesses rational and ethically tolerable intentions, has an inhibiting effect on economic activity. Specifically, for neo-liberals the promotion of the private interests refers to a procedure that is regarded as a good practice while the promotion of the public could create several disparities. Such ideas are linked to a form of extreme individualism, as expressed in Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement that “there is no society, only individuals and their families”. The intervening state is considered a mechanism that cultivates a culture of dependence and thus undermines freedom, which is understood as a freedom of choice. On the other hand, self-help, individual responsibility and entrepreneurship, are supported by neoliberals. In general, these ideas are thought to be promoted through the process of globalization, which is often characterized as “neoliberal globalization” (Heywood, 2000: 83). The basic neoliberal policies include privatization, reduction of public spending, deregulation, tax cuts (mainly in businesses and direct taxes) and welfare state policies’ dismantling. In this context and for more than three decades, neoliberalism was the dominant economic ideology. While, as an ideology, emerged unharmed from the global economic crisis of 2008-9, neoliberalism is now exposed - more than ever - to several critiques which claim that it has failed to fulfill its initial and fundamental promises-objectives. This study aims to analyze the basic parameters of neoliberalism in order to investigate the level of persuasiveness of the neoliberal ideology.

Progressive Inequality : Rich and Poor in New York, 1890–1920, by David Huyssen

Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890-1920, by David Huyssen. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014. 378 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). Given the title chosen by David Huyssen and the debates sparked by Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, 2014), I expected the book under review to delineate the measureable inequalities that separated rich and poor in early twentieth-century New York City. Instead Huyssen dissects the qualitative and discursive aspects of class relations and the rhetorical devices that cloaked the reality of inequality. He takes as a given that Progressive-era New York was characterized by a two-class social structure, a ruling class that owned property (or capital) and a subaltern class that faced a precarious existence and lacked adequate and secure income. Huyssen also emphasizes the shifting relationship between class and gender. For Huyssen domestic progressive reform as instituted by the city's upper class became an integral part of the nation's larger imperial project. What does Huyssen add to a story that has had a myriad of narrators and consumed reams of paper from scholars such as Sven Beckert, Allen Davis, Nancy Schrom Dye, and Robin Jacoby? Certainly it is not a single-city variation of Piketty's thesis on how unregulated capitalism creates ever greater levels of inequality. It does not alter Beckert's tale of how moneyed New Yorkers cemented their class power in the city and wielded it in practice. Nor do I think that Huyssen alters what others have previously written about strikes in early twentieth-century New York, the activities of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), and the role of social settlements. He does, however, approach the role of the WTUL through the lens of contemporary gender studies and relate the attitudes of upper-class social reformers to the era of high Western imperialism. Huyssen's choice of subjects raises questions as does his selection of actors. Why choose Richard Watson Gilder, Stanford White, Josephine Shaw Lowell, Jacob Schiff, and Lillian Wald as primary reformers? The choice of Gilder makes some sense as he was a key architect of the tenement house reform movement. White seems an odd choice beyond serving as the favoured architect of the city's wealthy and as designer of the new Bowery Savings Bank, a building that Huyssen designates as symbolic of the imperialistic ambitions of New York's dominant class. Lowell personifies the governing values of the city's dominant private charity, the Charity Organization Society (COS), another subject of the book's opening chapters. The COS introduced modern scientific methods of studying and assisting the needy, yet continued to rely on traditional notions that distinguished the deserving from the undeserving poor. Similar questions concern Huyssen's choice of strikes to investigate, the subject of the book's final six chapters. More than half those chapters examine the strikes of immigrant women garment workers, most notably the uprising of the 20,000, the 1909-10 struggle by shirtwaist makers, in which Huyssen toys with gender relations as exposed in the interactions between immigrant workers and upper class women in the WTUL. …

Sapna NYC: Participatory Research, Cooperative Economic Strategies with South Asian Immigrant Women in the Bronx, and the Possibilities for South/Asian America

Abstract After the onset of the Great Recession that began in 2008, many social progressives and others disenchanted with unregulated corporate capitalism have been significantly interested in exploring workplace democracy through worker-owned cooperatives and other tools. This article focuses on one nonprofit organization—Sapna NYC—that works with South Asian American women in the Bronx. The article will discuss the agency's adaptive and evolving work that recognizes the holistic health impacts of socioeconomic status and has come up with a novel approach to support participants in building worker-owned cooperative businesses that they own and control. This article will discuss the intended health, economic, and social impacts of the project, as well as the challenges, opportunities, questions, and implications of the agency's worker cooperative incubation program for South/Asian American communities and community organizations throughout the United States.1 The article suggests how Sapna NYC's experienc...

Governmentality of Michel Foucault and Global Economic Crisis

Michel Foucault explored that he called ‘governmentality’ or ‘rationality of government’ at the end of 1970"s. Foucault defined government as a form of activity aiming to shape, guide or affect the conduct of some person or persons. Governmentality or rationality of government means a way of thinking about the nature of the practice of government who can govern, what governing is, who is governed. Foucault applied this perspective of analysis to the different historical domains. Until seventeenth-century, governmentality associated with the idea of "reason of state" to establish the strong nation. In eighteenth-century, governmentality associated with the idea of liberalism for the purpose of security and prosperity of some person or persons. Recently, governmentality considered as a way of rethinking the rationality of government to keep the capitalism in the form of neo-liberalism.BR The changing notion of governmentality at the capitalist society is made by economic crises. Governmentality of "reason of state" was changed to the governmentality of liberalism by the notion that the state cannot control the market in that way we have to leave the market alone as it is. Governmentality of liberalism was changed to Keynesian economics and the principle of welfare state by the Great Depression in 1930"s. In 1970, neo-liberal hegemony was presented by the collapse of system of Bretton Woods. The crisis of sub-prime mortgage and European financial crisis have accelerated a shift in governmentality. The global financial and economic crisis started in 2008 called into question the economic system of liberalization and deregulation of the capital that was managed by global financial agencies. In the present global crisis, will there be any radical changes? Nation-state feel obliged to move into the economy to repair the collapse of economic system done by unregulated capitalism. At the same time, the dominant international financial agencies have to adjust to a new balance of global capitalism in the global governance.

Ties That Bind: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Quest for Economic Justice

Ties That Bind: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Quest for Economic Justice

What Is To Be Done?

What Is To Be Done? William E. Connolly (bio) Occupy Wall Street, or better described, the 99% movement, represents a delayed reaction to the political economy of inequality, crisis, military adventurism, and corporate authoritarianism of the last 30 years. It carries the potential to energize the democratic left, to pull Obama and Blue Dog Democrats toward the left, to mobilize local energies, and to awaken a yet larger section of the American populace. Its immediate adversaries are Wall Street, the volatility of unregulated capitalism, Republican blockage of corporate regulation, jobs programs and existing tax policies, the right edge of the evangelical movement, the lack of labor and consumer representation on governing boards of most firms, the diffidence of the democratic party, campaign laws that flood the air waves with right wing disinformation, the right wing majority on the Supreme Court, and a 24-hours news media that uses distraction and scandal mongering to draw attention from the plight of the urban poor. The dynamics of this critical movement deserve much closer attention, but that will not be my focus today. One question the media poses, now that it can no longer simply ignore this movement, is, "What do these people want?" "What do they stand for, anyway?" Below are a few interim answers to such questions. The interim answers are definitely at odds with the pure market fantasies of neoliberal capitalism. But they are compatible with capitalism per se, understood as production for profit, contractual labor, the primacy of the commodity form, a significant degree of competition between firms, and a large role for the state. A large state? In actual fact, every advanced capitalist country has a large state; they vary in the extent to which they support egalitarianism, unemployment benefits, health care, and sustainable modes of consumption over huge prison expenditures, intensive crime control policies, and gargantuan military budgets on the other. Capitalism per se has serious problems, dangers and limits, but that is not the focus now. Some policy responses, then: 1. A minimal objective is to transform the tax code so that capital gains taxes, now set at 15%, are equalized with other taxes. If you earn, say, over $300,000 in income, your capital gains will be taxed at the same adjusted rates as your income tax. This reform means that incomes gained from work and investment are treated equally. A much more progressive tax system is also required. And a transaction tax on derivatives is required that could bring in a few hundred billion over a decade, even as the myth that low taxes for the rich generate high productivity must be exposed. And the indispensability of the state must be acknowledged by the shape of a progressive tax system. 2. Banks must be required to set aside much bigger deposits for the loans they make, to reduce the chances of another bank induced world collapse. Investment and savings banks must be separated once again, prohibiting the casino approach to investment by banks. Housing foreclosures, most of which have been created by a crisis started at the top, can be stopped by renegotiating loans. Unemployment insurance must be extended. 3. State policies must be introduced to press banks and corporations to invest the huge amount of capital they have on hand. How? One approach would be to reward institutions that invest their funds in productive ways with modest tax breaks while hitting those which curtail growth with tax increases. As this is done, it is essential to publicize to the broader populace how the most immediate barrier to job growth today is the current unwillingness of private institutions to invest their capital. 4. A general jobs program, alone, is not sufficiently focused. State action must aim at reconstituting the general infrastructure of consumption that now sets the frame of possibility in which everyday consumption is set. By building fast transit systems, trolleys, trains, and bike paths you shift a large portion of current state expenditures and subsidies from roads, highways and airports toward more egalitarian alternatives; you open up new possibilities of production; and you introduce less expensive consumer choices for travel. By creating a state health care system you increase the competitive position...

Road Show (review)

Reviewed by: Road Show Alisa C. Roost Road Show. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by John Weidman. Directed by John Doyle. Public Theater, New York City. 6 December 2008. Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman have collaborated on three of the most unusual musicals—Pacific Overtures, Assassins, and Road Show—all of which deal with the negative impact of elements of the American Dream, a theme Sondheim has interwoven into many of his shows. Sondheim and Weidman and their directors also have experimented with techniques unusual for the commercial musical stage, including Brechtian alienation and traditional Japanese theatre conventions. Pacific Overtures explores the effect on Japan when the United States demanded access to trade. Featuring two Japanese characters influenced by American culture, it allows the audience some of the traditional pleasures of emotional identification. Assassins, a meditation on the dark side of the American Dream, examines the motivations of presidential assassins. The main characters reveal their passionate and intellectual underpinnings, thus giving the show surprising moments of emotional resonance. A few group numbers delve into the societal conditions the motley characters share, but the beauty of the individual solos is more chilling. When John Wilkes Booth sings his magnificently evil thoughts, the moments create a weird dissonance between his passionate commitment (and the beautiful music) and his horrific acts. Unusual in its subject material, Assassins is one of the more successful uses of Verfremdungseffekt in the American musical theatre: enticing audiences into identifying with the passions of the characters, and then being utterly repelled by that identification. [End Page 624] Click for larger view View full resolution Michael Cerveris (Wilson) and company in Road Show. (Photo: Joan Marcus.) Road Show tells the story of two antagonistic brothers at the turn of the last century as each pursues his own version of the American Dream. Road Show has had three major incarnations with three different directors. In 2000, the show (then known as Wise Guys and directed by Sam Mendes) applied a light touch; Nathan Lane and Victor Garber sparkled with vaudevillian humor and witty repartee. The various issues relating to the dark side of the American Dream percolated without a particularly didactic edge, while humor, wit, and charisma drove the show. The second act had not been finished by the beginning of the run, leaving only delicious possibilities. With a phenomenal cast in an unusually small theatre, Wise Guys allowed Garber and Lane to pull the audience into their camaraderie. Their charisma may have overshadowed the work itself, but, to my mind, it remains the most successful version of the show. In 2003, Harold Prince collaborated with Sondheim on Bounce, for which a cast album is available. In the post-9/11 environment, the show became larger, with more focus on the broad scope of the brothers’ lives without focusing on a specific theme. Strongly plot-based with little character introspection, the Mizner brothers had more romance (heterosexual for Wilson, homosexual for Addison) and more of a happy ending. The show touched on a variety of themes: sibling rivalry, dueling visions of the American Dream, artistic passions, and the interplay of various forms of capitalism with art and con games, but it never explored any single theme to satisfaction. In 2008, John Doyle directed a sparse production of the piece, now titled Road Show, tightly focused on the economic themes. Serendipitously timed, the show premiered in the midst of the economic meltdown. Early in the show, the boys’ father tells his sons that their choices will be “determining what kind of nation we’ll be,” forging a life from the riches of nature and their own determination. Wilson (Michael Cerveris) embodies the “cocaine-fueled con game” of unregulated capitalism under the Bush administration, dabbling in anything that could gain him wealth or notoriety, feeding his drug habit and ego. The Boca Raton housing crisis, a major plot point in the show, comments on our recent disastrous economic bubbles. In sharp contrast, Addison Mizner (Alexander Gemignani) serves as an archetype for what many see as the upside of capitalism; his round-the-world tour is a subtle history of Western colonialism, for he visits only former colonies. Unlike his country...

CONSUMING CLASS: Multilevel Marketers in Neoliberal Mexico

Since the 1980s, Mexican leaders have followed other Latin American countries in pursuing neoliberal economic policies designed to stimulate foreign investment, reduce public spending, and promote free trade. Recent studies of indigenous movements and popular protests challenge the idea that these market-based economic reforms enjoy a broad consensus and suggest that elites impose them by force. By turning the focus to middle-class Mexicans, I argue that some nonelite sectors of society avidly welcome the reign of the free market. Although they do not profit directly from unregulated capitalism, the middle class looks to neoliberalism to ensure access to the material markers of class status. The rising popularity of multilevel marketing companies in Mexico, which glorify consumption and celebrate the possibilities of entrepreneurship, demonstrates the appeal of neoliberalism to citizens fearful of diminished purchasing power. By tying consumption to globalized free markets, neoliberalism does not need coercion to win acceptance.

Greening of Agriculture for Long‐Term Sustainability

Consolidation and growth of large corporations in U.S. agriculture are facing increasing scrutiny from a consumer public with growing awareness of environment issues. More people in society now question not only where food is grown and what types of practices impact the environment, but how the benefits are distributed. Although driven by short‐term economics in many purchasing decisions, consumers are asking whether we could continue our standard of living while maintaining the natural resource base and not polluting the environment. Agricultural corporations are responding to this consumer concern by greening some of their operations and especially greening their images. Is this a real conversion in methods and products or merely a “greenwashing” of the corporate image? Large corporations face economic, environmental, and social challenges in their quest for an improved image. Examples in five major areas illustrate the impacts of corporate agriculture: industrial organic food production, consolidation of farms, genetically modified organisms, global food systems, and unregulated capitalism and limited‐liability corporations. Each is related to structural conditions in agriculture, and each must be addressed by corporations that are serious about improving their images with consumers. To deal with these issues that impact both farmers and consumers, positive alternatives to conventional mainstream business approaches are discussed.