The NYT does a hit job on a book decrying neoliberal NGOs and philanthrocapitalism

I have just gotten done reading The Reproach of Hunger," a very insightful book about how future battles against international hunger will be different than in the past, and why.

It's also about how, if the battle is to be ethical, and is to truly help the developing world's economies in general, not just providing more food, how it SHOULD be different.

Here's my review from Goodreads. At the end, I'll pick up the thread of discussion.

The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century by David Rieff
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

David Rieff turns a critical eye to the holy trinity of modern international development and aid, the neoliberal holy trinity of the World Bank, the IMF, and willingly co-opted NGOs. For an additional splash of critique, his gimlet eye includes turns to the world of philanthrocapitalism and what Rieff calls Bill Gates' second monopoly, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Rieff does not buy into every critique of the neoliberal development machine as offered by peasants groups', other local Global South advocates and their non-neoliberal Global North supporters, but he does give an open listening to all of them and agrees with a fair amount. He even engages somewhat with Hayekian-type naked capitalism supporters in the development game, without agreeing with them at all.

So, to the degree this is a polemic, it's a well-argued, thought-out polemic, one that Rieff notes has been several years in the making.

His critique of the neoliberal development machine has several main points.
1. While it ostensibly calls for "transparency" and "accountability" it does NOT call for "democracy."
2. It does not bring human rights into issues of hunger and poverty in any great way.
3. The hypercapitalism of neoliberalism believes that it's "enough" for a rising tide to lift the global poor's boats out of poverty, even if income inequality increases.
4. Referencing Yevegny Morozov (mentioned once here, though his famous word is not) it has a "solutionist" approach to developing world agricultural problems.
5. It has a scientistic approach to its own ideas, along with that believing that if it does make mistakes, they're all self-correcting. Related to that, it believes that it knows better than natives what's good for their own countries and environments.
6. A naive, secular Success Gospel optimism that believes neoliberalism can conquer all — often at the expense of ignoring the realities of what destruction climate change is likely to wreak, and the possible wars and civil wars that will accompany that.

Beyond this are two other points, one implicit in Rieff's book, and one that's really not, and that could have been brought out more in this otherwise excellent volume.

The one other implicit thing, going along with his these that modern neoliberalism is a religion of sorts, is that the holy trinity plus the likes of Gates are often preaching at the developing world. Often, it's a developmental version of the Success Gospel, but sometimes, it's a developmental version of old-fashioned Calvinism, per the last part of my Point No. 5.

The thing that he didn't bring out more, and that he could have, relates to main point No. 3. And that is that, in modern hypercapitalism, "money = power." Per "Brave New World," which Rieff references near the end of the book, with governments acquiescing more and more to businesses, as well as NGOs that used to be more truly liberal not only is the alleged wisdom of "market forces" accepted as infallible, the power to enforce its alleged wisdom is also accepted as generally good. This is why, per Point No. 3, the big businesses, and the plutocratic foundations, don't want NGOs to focus on income inequality, or on democracy. They don't want developing world natives to be more empowered.

Rieff, while not cynical about the possibility of change, is indeed pessimistic. This is part of where he departs from peasants' movements and their supporters in the North. He does note they've had some local successes in resistance but that, in general, they've lost ground to the neoliberal machine.

"I am convinced that the truly powerful revolution that is occurring today is not in (these) insurrectionary episodes ... but rather in what Jon Cray has called 'the emancipation of market forces from social and political control.' "

Sadly, I think he is right.


View all my reviews

Rieff has a fair amount of animus for the Holy Trinity of the international poverty industry, as noted in my Goodreads review. Throw in the new breed of "philanthrocapitalists," of which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation get the most notice (but whom aren't necessarily that different from Ford, Rockefeller, etc.), and you get the picture.

Well, I've seen the likes of the New York Times deliberately select certain reviewers, with certain angles, for books before. Sometimes, there's a book that's about a "big issue," and written by someone with lots of insight and experience, plus, in the case of Rieff, with a certain level of "connection," enough that the book can't be ignored.

But, because it goes too far against the grain of the mainstream media consensus, such a book then "needs" a negative review.

But, it's reached a new level of outright hit-job with its review on this.

Not finding Paul Collier on Twitter, I googled for his Oxford page to email him and struck paydirt.

Collier has written multiple books on international development, and they've been heavily puffed by well-known left-neoliberals like Nick Kristof and the moneybags of left-neoliberalism, George Soros, as well as former World Bank prez Robert Zoellick. Real liberals should not love Soros just because he, and a considerable amount of his money in the past, have gone into fighting Republicans. He threw Asian economies in the ditch during the 1998 monetary crisis. He surely has profited from the Great Recession. He's willing to throw his alleged environmentalist credentials out the door if he can make a buck on Big Coal. (Fellow daddy warbucks alleged environmentalist Tom Steyer owns coal holdings in Indonesia, by the way.) That said, per Counterpunch, Soros may not have renewed interest in coal; just an ongoing interest in manipulating commodities prices.

Counterpunch, in a piece called "The Soros Syndrome," took his measure five years ago.

And the NYT picked an Oxford prof who's a toady to the likes of Soros to show that the neoliberal international development emperor has no clothes. And, who in addition to a hit job of a review, presents a simplified dichotomy as what all is being argued about over how to do international poverty aid and related development.

Even if Collier's particular institutions aren't mentioned by Rieff, it's clear that Collier has his own neoliberal NGO skin in the game. I've emailed Collier to this effect; we'll see if he responds. As of a week out, he has not.

Professor Collier? Silence means assent, per the old maxim.

And, without irony or anything else on its part, the NYT starts the new year with a puff piece on Bill Gates' book reviews.

"Time is money" ≠ "money is time"

"Time is money," to me, ranks right up there as a hypercapitalistic statement along with the neoliberal "work hard, play hard." Or the neoliberal phrase for families of "quality time." Frank Bruni reminds us well to reject the myth of "quality time."

But, if you'll think about it, you'll never hear the hypercapitalists say "money is time."

There are rare exceptions. Dan Price (Twitter) of Gravity Payments, re my blogging about my skepticism about his payroll generosity at Gravity, eventually responded that he has what he called as "unlimited" paid time off, but probably hasn't pushed employees to use it enough.

Update, Dec. 17: A Dec. 1 story by Bloomberg makes him out to be hypocritical, not just "interesting." The big pay raise came only after a lawsuit against the company. He was, and arguably still is, overpaid as CEO for a company his size, even within the US's generous allowance of CEO pay. And his ex-wife, in a pending book, alleges spousal abuse.

With that said, I won't even try Tweeting Price about this. He refused to comment to Bloomberg, in various ways, about the lawsuit. He denied his ex-wife's allegations straight up.

This is all part of the alleged "Protestant work ethic." Show you've "earned" money, even if such things as justice, and therefore just desserts, don't really exist. Work hard to prove your Social-Darwinism toughness. Work hard to work on-the-job competitors, whether at another company or your own, into the dirt.

Work hard believing that "play hard" actually works. "Play hard" while refusing to note that income inequality means that many Americans don't have the wherewithal to play hard.

And, if you're a libertarian, paint yourself in a shiny neoliberal dross.

#Piketty: A liberal Frenchman ignorant of unions? Or not quite so liberal?

Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman via Salon
(Credit: Reuters/Charles Platiau/Anton Golubev)

Or a left-neoliberal trying to pose as an actual liberal?

Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" has gotten a lot of touts. That goes even as far as Counterpunch. So, it has to be true liberal, right?

Well, Thomas Frank notes one big absence. I'd not read the book yet, but in hindsight, his review points out what all the other reviews missed.

Frank, like others, praises the analysis, while astutely noting, although without quite as much depth as Counterpunch, that Piketty's not new, nor alone.

I was puzzled at first by the extraordinary success of Piketty’s book; despite his commitment to cant-free prose, it is not an easy read. Besides, most of what Piketty tells us has been told to us before, many times over, in a three-decade long parade of forgotten treatises and sad New York Times stories on downsizing and deindustrialization.

Going beyond that, he also touts Piketty for slapping around most of his fellow economists.

One of the best things about Piketty’s masterwork is his systematic demolition of his own discipline. Academic economics, especially in the United States, has for decades been gripped by a kind of professional pretentiousness that is close to pathological. From time to time its great minds have grown so impressed by their own didactic awesomeness that they celebrate economics as “the imperial science”— “imperial” not merely because economics is the logic of globalization but because its math-driven might is supposedly capable of defeating and colonizing every other branch of the social sciences. ...

Piketty blasts it all to hell. His fellow economists may have mastered the art of spinning abstract mathematical fantasies, he acknowledges, but they have forgotten that measuring the real world comes first.

However, on the prescriptions side? Frank points out that Piketty's French souffle just fell in the oven.

Yes, he talks about a wealth tax, which all other reviews have noted.

But, in an "emperor has no clothes" moment, Frank also points out that Piketty, a native of a country where even the farmers are unionized, doesn't have bupkis to say about boosting worker organization rights. 

Frank kind of buries the nutgrafs of a critical review three-quarters of the way down. But, I'm moving it up:

Turning to the problem of income inequality here in the United States, there is an even simpler solution (than a wealth tax), by which I mean a more realistic solution, a solution that builds on familiar American traditions,that works by empowering average people, that requires few economists or experts, that would involve a minimum of government interference, and that proceeds by expanding democracy and participation rather than by building some kind of distant and unapproachable global tax authority: Allow workers to organize. Let people have a say on the basic issues affecting their lives.

Piketty’s biggest blind spot is that he has virtually nothing to say about labor unions. He starts Chapter 1 of “Capital” with an anecdote about a bloody strike in South Africa and he returns to that same tragic episode at the very end of the book, but in between he addresses the matter almost not at all. Piketty talks a good game about democracy, but like other economists who have made inequality their subject, he prefers solutions that are handed down from the lofty heights of expertise. (My emphasis.)

As I said, the man's a native of a country where the farmers unionize. It's a blind spot, or worse.

That's why I use the phrase "left-neoliberalism," which I've talked about occasionally before. Click on that tag, at bottom, for more related posts.

Hey, France is full of technocrats. Christine Lagarde runs the International Monetary Fund, one of the holy of holies places of neoliberal technocrats. And, arguably, François Mitterand found the "Third Way" long before Bill Clinton or Tony Blair.

Calling this a blind spot might be charitable — and not just a little. I mean, per the sentence of Frank's that I bolded, isn't this the stereotypical neoliberal approach? Let us technocrats work out the solutions?

Frank then goes on:

It is not a coincidence that labor’s rise in the 1930s happened at the same time as the One Percent’s fall from grace, nor is it a coincidence that labor’s long decline has been almost a mirror image of the One Percent’s recovery of its nineteenth-century heaven. ...

The disappearing middle class? This is labor’s grievance par excellence. The minimum wage? Labor is always the loudest voice calling for an increase.

Frank admits that re-empowering organized labor is not the totality of the solution, either. He does note that it needs to be more of the solution in union-gutted America than in Europe.

Speaking of, Piketty apparently doesn't know a lot about America in general.

Frank also notes that this lack of knowledge is part of a bigger pattern of potholes in the book:

Unfortunately, Piketty’s enthusiasm for disciplines other than economics is more theoretical than anything else.

And, for someone claiming his book is as much history as economics, his American chocolate cake fell in the oven even more than his French souffle.

Whenever Piketty moves away from numbers and tries to describe life in the United States, things go wrong in a hurry. The worst example first: Piketty tells us that, unlike the French, Americans feel “no nostalgia for the postwar period” because our economy didn’t grow rapidly in those years. ...

Piketty’s command of American political history is, quite simply, abysmal. He announces that the U.S. “never became a colonial power,” which would be news to the people of the Philippines, not to mention the Sioux. ...

There are numerous other examples in Piketty’s enormous book of this weird blind spot concerning all things American; indeed, you could write an entire review just cataloguing them.

Bad, indeed.

At Counterpunch, Jack Rasmus gets at some of those same  union-related issues via a back door of sorts. Here's his key point on this issue:

Explaining inequality—not just reporting it—requires an analysis of how these various ‘forms of wages’ have been reduced in recent decades and especially since 2009. That deeper analysis leads to explanations of trends of destruction of unions and thus the higher union wage, the growing trend of outright ‘wage theft’ by businesses, the avoidance of paying overtime pay by reclassifying millions of workers as ‘exempt’ instead of hourly paid, the atrophying of the real minimum wage, the wage reduction effects of free trade, the shift to contingent labor, and all the reasons why the total unemployed (in and out of the labor force) are rising steadily and are chronically longer term jobless. Add to this the analyses of the many government policies introduced in recent years and decades that reduce the deferred, social, and future wage and underestimate the real wage.

Exactly. And, the noted destruction of unions has been part of the cause of the rest of this. But not all of it.

Compared to much of Europe, and especially Piketty's France, the word "union" has become a four-letter word to more and more vanishing middle-class Americans.

Well, folks that didn't happen out of nowhere. Since there is class war in America, the "unions are ebil" meme came out of the mouths of people who had reason to fear unions. And, it was easily sold. You're not middle class if you're in a union, you're working class. Plus, in traditional industrial unions, people who were promoted from line jobs to management were encouraged to leave unions for that reason. Probably, though I don't know for sure, back in the 1960s and ’70s, white folks promoted from line jobs to management were encouraged to leave their unions for other reasons, but that's another story.

In short, by missing the union part of the equation, Piketty is missing half the class warfare part of the issue.

And the need to re-empower labor, and workers' desire for that, was shown on May 15 by an international fast-food employees' strike. (That said, in details of the strike, I think $15/hr, without a phase-in of seven or so years, is too high. Even then, it might be a bit much. The $10.10 of Beltway rounds, with a four-year phase-in, AND a COLA clause as part of that, sounds about right to me.)

And, given that unionized French farmers have driven their tractors into the streets of Paris before, I can't believe this is totally accidental. So, thanks to Thomas Frank triggering some thought, I doubt I'll read Piketty's book.

Where is the "real left"? Why isn't it in the mainstream media more?

At Slate, Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick rhetorically ask those very questions, and have a follow-up asking for ideas. And, then, at Balkinization, Frank Pasquale has charged that they're looking for liberals in all the wrong places.

First, on where Pasquale is all wet.

If Mother Jones is an example of true liberalism, rather than, in general, left neoliberalism of some sort, I'll eat my hat. Kevin Drum has long been a neolib squish as its chief blogger, back to when he was at Washington Monthly, and even before. Chief investigative reporter David Corn has shown an increasing willingness to write Obamiac blank checks on snooping-related issues.

Don't get me wrong, MoJo is further left than Washington Monthly. But that doesn't say a lot. Hell, The Nation, as long as it continues to give short shrift to the Greens, or even Rocky Barker's Justice Party, isn't as left at times as it could be, that's for sure.

And, anything to the right of The Nation is almost guaranteed to have a David Corn stance on Obama's snooping. IOKIYAO.

But, back to that "left neoliberalism." That's who runs the Democratic Party today, overall — a slightly nuanced version of neoliberals. And so, Friedman and Lithwick rightly are concerned that real liberalism isn't on the pages of major newspapers, because it's largely undefended.

Now, the likes of Wendy Davis show that some of their concerns about reproductive choice support may be somewhat overblown. Still, that may not be total.

Pasquale's mention of certain Twitter accounts is interesting. Yes, there are individual bloggers out there fighting for labor rights and other social issues. But, how many of them are inside the Democratic Party, or inside the Party-connected apparatus of think tanks like the Center for American Progress, which has already shown its left neoliberal colors over chained CPI.

And, so, Pasquale's missing the point of Friedman and Lithwick. Sure, there's true liberals "out there." That's the whole problem; they're out there, and outside the circle of today's Democratic Party and its connected policy, public relations and rainmaking apparatus.

Why? As I've said in many ways before, what Friedman and Lithwick are too polite to say: Today's Democratic national leaders have no balls. Or, to repackage Teddy Roosevelt's comment about William McKinley, directed at Obama: "He has all the backbone of a chocolate eclair."

That includes Democratic senators like Ron Wyden who refuse to hold Team Obama officials to account for known lies.

And, if you have ideas for the two of them, email them here.

Mr. Pasquale submitted an excellent one, namely, a massive expansion of the Community Reinvestment Act, beyond home loans, and to far more types of financial organizations than banks.

Are there "left-neoliberals"? Would they include the likes of The Nation?

If you agree with this provocative piece by Warren Benn Michaels, as I do, you'll agree that those two rhetorical questions both deserve "yes" answers.

First, Benn defines the issue of left-neolibs versus right-neolibs

The differentiation between left and right neoliberalism doesn’t really undermine the way it which it is deeply unified in its commitment to competitive markets and to the state’s role in maintaining competitive markets. For me the distinction is that “left neoliberals” are people who don’t understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things.

Boom!

He then ties that to immigration in general, and illegal immigration in particular.

Here's your money graf.

"It’s a striking fact that what the American Left mainly wants to do is reduce the Tea Party to racists as quickly as humanly possible. ... But you can’t understand the real politics of the Tea Party unless you understand how important their opposition to illegal immigration is. Because who’s for illegal immigration? As far as I know only one set of people is for illegal immigration, I mean you may be [as a Marxist], but as far as I know the only people who are openly for illegal immigration are neoliberal economists."

And, that's why I could, to some degree, define the likes of The Nation as "left neoliberals" by his terms. Remember that big brouhaha several years ago when it had that long immigration article that, among other things, didn't distinguish legal and illegal immigrants?

Indeed, one Nation blogger really, really, doesn't like Michaels' writings. Richard Kim says:

From where does this seething, misplaced, amnesiac resentment, so often masquerading as class-consciousness (see Walter Benn Michaels) and fairness, come? 

Wow.

A more nuances reaction, within the Michaels piece, comes from someone I like a lot, Doug Henwood. The interviewer notes:

Doug Henwood, for example, mentioned, “Walter Benn Michaels doesn’t always phrase things to his advantage—he aims to provoke, which is an impulse I deeply understand, but he may end up putting people off who should really listen to what he has to say.”

I don't know enough about Michaels to say whether that's that true, but I'll take Henwood's word for it. Michaels admits he writes "sharply," and on purpose. 

Michaels reminds us that statistics tell us not to view economic inequality through left-neoliberal victimization, or to think that the Tea Party's railings against "handouts" that stereotypically go to black and brown minorities is true:

Victimization that does not take place through discrimination is invisible and that’s why it’s worth remembering that the vast majority of poor people in the country are White. After all, the country is about 70 percent white and if you look at the bottom quintile of income it’s about 61 percent white, so it’s an absolute majority. 

And, it's not just stereotypical white Appalachia, either.

Read the full piece for more insights, including rejecting the idea that treating the poor as an "identity group," kind of like Gordon Brown did in Britain, is the logical solution.

I would like to be less pessimistic than Michaels. But, in an America where probably half the decent-paying new jobs in America, outside the financial manipulation sector, are defense, spying, or extractive industries that suck workers dry, it's hard not to be depressed.

And, maybe, just maybe, we should put Glenn Greenwald in those left-neoliberals. That's if, despite his protestations, we don't call him a libertarian, undiluted, instead.