The Language of Finance and Magical Thinking

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was asked about his political philosophy last month in The New York Times, around the time he submitted a state budget that cut social services, cut education, and cut health care. His answers would reveal all of the core contradictions at the center of the current state financial crisis. They would also display crafty and seemingly unconscious slippages between the crisis as political and the crisis as economic, as if the budget deficit negated philosophy itself.

In the face of the crisis, Cuomo had to simultaneously appear impishly naïve and courageously reasonable. The tension between these positions was evident immediately and never resolved. The accompanying rhetoric, from both Cuomo and the Times, was first of all unstable and contradictory by design, both intentionally and by accident. This accomplishment, if you can call it that, is still noticeable on the Times site. The Times’ online headline of the article morphs from a laudatory, almost editorial-page tone on the regional page link, but turns into a poor attempt at liberal objectivity once one clicks through to it. The regional page link reads, "For Cuomo, Pragmatism Guides Path to Center," while the article page reads "Cuomo’s Centrism Draws Praise But Stirs Suspicion." The first proffers praise, the second invokes critique.

Once one’s read the article, this goofy misalignment of headlines exposes itself as a textbook example of form signaling content. As we shall see, the Times and Cuomo are confused for the same reason. Once one begins to read, one quickly comes to see the inflexible ideology guiding Cuomo’s political office. His rhetoric mirrored the liberal discourse of the Times perfectly: "I’m a progressive Democrat that’s broke," they report him to have said. The short statement is almost nonsensical, but it’s endlessly revealing about the psychology of those who, like Cuomo, must manage the tricky gap between educated, healthy citizens and the economic institutions that must create surplus value from citizen bodies, citizen labor, and citizen consumption.

Rhetorically, the statement is literally a collision between two discourses, the political ("progressive") and the economic ("broke"). It’s a knowing declaration that the intersection of two systems, one political and one economic, is at the very center of a social conflict, and also that the latter power, the economic one, is dominant and negates the former. The logic here says that progressive politics can only work during economic expansions, as if political policies were subtended by the economy. This denies the existence of corporate welfare in any form – as tax breaks, as subsidies, as incentives. This denial shapes the article and Cuomo, but also shapes the national debate on the deficit, on education, and on the role of corporations in democratic governments.

With these denials in mind, the end of the article is truly stunning. The paper first remarks that Cuomo declined to be interviewed for the article, but that last October he gave a "rare" on the record interview. Rather than critique his explicit removal from democratic forms of accountability such as the press, the paper compliments him again. The supposed objectivity of journalism is transparently invested in Cuomo’s critique, either out of slavish identification or psychological blindness. "He showed little interest in ideological labels," the Times narrates about the interview, as if ideology could only be evidence of an extreme position, and as if what would follow from the interview was itself divorced from ideology. Then, poignantly, the Times allows Cuomo to have the last words. By ending with Cuomo, the article announces that there could be no further narration or critique. One is in the rarefied test tube of insular, well-sealed liberalism.

The promiscuous silence that would follow, however, makes Cuomo’s quite choice words all the more violent. "I’m a realist," Cuomo said – notably, another liberal synonym for pragmatic. But he goes on. "Numbers are numbers," he intones. Here the language between the Times and Cuomo conflates through the surplus quotation marks made necessary by the sliding temporality of Cuomo’s words: "Numbers are numbers. ‘I want to have a political discussion,’" he mimicked. "They’re numbers. Forget the philosophy. Here are the numbers."

And scene.

Cuomo’s repetition – one might dare say compulsion – to repeat the word "numbers" over and over again speaks to the pseudo-scientific pretense of objectivity projected by any vocabulary attached to finance and statistics. The effect is similar to Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘known knowns’ early in the Iraq War, when it became obvious that power speaks it own special discourse of philosophy. Cuomo’s discourse is all the more invidious and vicious, though, because he flatly denies any connection between political choice and economic fact. What he doesn’t say is that those numbers could change by raising taxes on the rich. What he doesn’t say is that those numbers would be different if financial regulation had prevented massive, industry-wide fraud throughout the financial and insurance sector while he was attorney general.

Instead, the repetition-compulsion of the word "numbers" said again and again covers over the failures of the statement as an argument. Yet there’s even more to it. Cuomo "mimics" some unknown speaker for wanting to have a political discussion. This tone is outright contemptuous, haughty, and superior. Then after incanting the magical "numbers" once more, he says to the imagined speaker – perhaps the ‘suspicious’ in the aforementioned second title of the article – "forget the philosophy." Without seeming too paranoid here, one wonders why Cuomo directs New York state to forget, and why. And yet if one doesn’t take Cuomo at his word and believes instead the crisis has come from conscious political choices, then one would have to believe that Cuomo was either maliciously lying or in embarrassing denial. Emotionally, his superior tone borders on angry. And angry people often act that way as a defense mechanism for their own guilt. Deep down, perhaps Cuomo feels guilty for forgetting the administration of his father, and the lost convictions of a more democratic era.

The article thus pointedly tries to assert that these cuts and the budget itself were the product of an absence of an underlying political philosophy. The moment thus becomes a classic case for understanding how ideology manifests itself – it is always most present at the point where a speaker disavows it.
Cuomo and the Times are branches off the same tree. The terms in the Times’ headline are more than descriptive of a situation; they are thin and flimsy, but they are the working concepts of modern liberalism. They are words that disguise economic harm as the strongly sought and prized consensus between right-wing nationalists, corporate profit imperatives, wealthy campaign donors, and, somewhere down there, the vulnerable citizen bodies at the mercy of the tax system.

This confusion ultimately hails from the contradictions of liberalism itself. Liberalism is an economic philosophy transposed through political rhetoric. They bleed together. The economic justification for liberal political philosophy allows liberalism a wily, trickster defense of its core beliefs in both infinite growth capitalism and modest social safety nets for the vulnerable. This tricky defense is satisfying because it’s smartly dressed up in the infallible discourse of "scientific" economics. To the extent that the disciplinary premise of economics as a "science" argues for infinite growth capitalism as scientifically, ecologically, and socially defendable, then economics as a discipline is a pseudo-science on par with eugenics and scientific racism.

In the early twentieth century you could major in eugenics at Ivy league colleges. It was a disciplinary form of knowledge dependent on already-existing social forms of power arranged by apartheid and segregation. Contemporary pro-capitalist economics is the same: to hear it is to understand how the most satanic vocabularies rearrange into the most soothing and casual words of the "true." This is arguable because both forms of science were put to use – and still are – to justify the state’s biopolitical management of life as inevitable, natural, and in the name of life itself – if one understands life itself to be the life of the state, as New York and the United States. The "survival" of both is dependent on "cutting" funds that particular communities use for social reproduction: the poor and the vulnerable. Using the contemporary rhetoric of finance and economics, if one must cut the budget and direct harm to certain populations, one doesn’t need to worry about being racist, nor about being charged with planning a soft, generational war against the some specific group. One is a hero acting in the name of science.
　
This conflict within liberalism is a soft war waged by different social actors through a common terrain – government. It’s a war in the sense that cuts to education destroy opportunities for citizens to access knowledge essential to their own individual reproduction, and also to the social reproduction of their communities. Uneducated citizens don’t have access to middle-class jobs, which are themselves increasingly fragile vehicles to obtain the basic stuff the body needs for healthy reproduction, both on the cellular level and on the interpersonal one. Unhealthy, stressed bodies break down; their immune system breaks down. They self-medicate; they work constantly. 45 million Americans live like this. Almost three million New Yorkers live like this.

To simplistically say instead that poverty "breeds" more poverty is really to say that stressed bodies live on the threshold of health. They are excluded from healthy environments and economically valorized forms of knowledge. It’s hard for working class bodies to eat healthy, for example. Cheap food causes heart and digestive diseases, comes with sickening hormones and pesticides that may contribute to cancer, and requires working-class labor at fast food restaurants and meatpacking plants that is physically dangerous, morally degrading, and shockingly cruel. The industrial food system is an on-going catastrophe of unsustainable production, and the federal government subsidizes it through billions of dollars of corporate welfare. It’s an extreme situation with extreme consequences, intended and unintended. But in the liberal imagination, maintaining that system is pragmatic.

In the aggregate, at the scale of entire populations, budget decisions are biopolitical. They affect what bodies living at the threshold of health might be tipped into the declining spiral of permanent physical decay. Cuomo’s declaration that he’s broke is in fact a subtle argument about who he thinks should die – not individually, but statistically.

Perversely, Cuomo’s fidelity to the rhetoric of finance signifies an agreed upon paradigm that purports to be objective, rational, and common sense. This is the paradigm that defines contemporary American politics, and unites the majorities of both political parties. Democrats allege that Mitt Romney’s campaign has funneled his PAC money to his presidential campaign, which come mainly from corporations. Yet the Democrats have been working hard to create their own anonymous Political Action Committee (PAC) fund-raisers. Led by former White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton, a new PAC called Priorities USA will advertise on campaign issues without disclosing its financial donors. For Priorities USA and for Mitt Romney, there are only technical differences about how corporate money funds particular campaigns.
To see this issue as a conflict between Democrats and Republicans, however, obscures the larger infrastructure that finances both sides. The election system is corrupt either way. To repeat platitudes and clichés about the role of money in politics here would be pointless. The situation is far more critical than any articulation about reform.

Democracy in the United States has already assumed a corporate form, and we’re living through it. It’s not coming; it’s here. It was said that Bush was the first CEO President, whatever that meant. Yet the sinister fact is that both parties are funded by corporations, legislation is written by corporations, and the Supreme Court secures constitutional rights for corporations that are extra-legal and numbingly "activist."

In another all-too-obvious moment, Cuomo’s director of state operations Howard Glaser told the Times recently, without blinking, that "we’re a $100 billion-plus corporation that’s squandered its buying power, has no standardization across business units and does not reward efficiency." He said this without self-consciousness or irony. The mission and the vocabulary of state government are self-identical with that of Kellogg, Exxon, and General Electric.

Government and business are co-agents; the state is simply where corporate managers negotiate small concessions within the vestigial democratic forms of an earlier era of self-government, which itself was confused by the inclusive, gendered rhetoric of the Constitution’s commitment to suffrage. In Unequal Protection Thom Hartman defines fascism, via the dictionary, "as a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of the state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

In this prism, it doesn’t take significant imagination to concede that the "extreme right" need not occupy every city or every state to wield considerable influence over national policies and legislation. Nor is it utterly mad to interpret the simultaneous occupations of multiple foreign nations supported by a philosophy of national "exceptionalism" as a populist wing of "belligerent nationalism" that inadvertently creates the electoral conditions for corporate government to succeed. One must simply stop associating fascism with individuals, and understand how a fascist system might work within vestigial democratic forms.

In the United States, one does not need to think hard to understand that the office of President has become a fascist position even as the body of the executive changes every four or eight years. This stems from the extra-constitutional power of "commander in chief" position created by the National Security State after the Second World War. In Bomb Power Gary Wills argues that this extra-constitutional commander arose out of the explicit anxiety about the possibilities of nuclear destruction, and the need for secrecy at the federal level that grew out of the Manhattan Project. Whatever its origin, the commander in chief can declare war without progress, publish "executive orders" with no constitutional standing, and direct secret and illegal acts by agencies like the CIA.

Cynically, maybe, the rest is biopolitical management. This management takes place in the language of budgets. What defines our contemporary experience of this biopolitical management is that it turns on the pseudo-science of economics, the pseudo-objectivity of finance, and the brutal conviction that "numbers" are the real agents of social change – and not actors like Cuomo. The rhetoric of contemporary fascism is finance, and it’s used in Manhattan boardrooms and by government employees who believe that governments are, indeed, corporations.

Unbelievers will point to arrests made in both government and finance. The vestiges of the democratic legal system still function to recognize theft by individual citizens, and there is a distinct form of trial and punishment that can follow criminals too disorganized to adapt their form of extraction to the current temporality, which will not destroy organized crime but will in fact bail it out.

For example, a former federal technology consultant for the Education department, Willard Lanham, stole 3.6 million dollars with the direct aid of IBM and Verizon. Although only Lanham has been charged, both corporations profited from the mutually beneficial contracts and over-billing. It’s much easier to isolate Lanham because he’s an individual, and because he doesn’t make campaign contributions. Lanham might even have eluded the threat of prison if he had incorporated himself first. Or better yet, he should have traded his independent contractor status for the protection of a firm, which would have had lawyers on retainer. Whatever the justification, the democratic prosecuting system can’t "see" the crimes by IBM and Verizon any more than Cuomo can see beyond the numbers. The only ones that cannot see the water are the fish – until they are gasping for breath.

If Lanham Corporation had been at blame, rather than Willard Lanham, one could argue that he would have simply paid a large fine. There is no actual advantage in one’s legal status as an "individual" in the United States, either as a voter, as a taxpayer, or as a contractor. The most powerful citizens in the United States are corporate persons, protected by the concept of "corporate personhood" – a distinction that escaped the Constitution, but one upheld as a legal fiction since Southern Pacific Railroad v. Santa Clara County. In the 1886 decision a headnote was famously added by a court reporter, and the railroad corporation was allowed to use the Fourteenth Amendment to defend itself before the Supreme Court. This is commonly understood to be the constitutional wormhole that reordered the universe of democratic politics forever: it gave corporations the same rights as individual American citizens, even though corporations have no bodies.
The idea of such a powerful headnote is surreal and even ridiculous: headnotes have no legal standing. Yet the absurd persistence of its power has given the headnote an historical aura, as if it came from an actual Supreme Court decision. Today it provides corporations with the retrospective cloak of common law. This escalating legal power of corporations seems to know no barriers, and relies on the concept of corporate personhood enacted by that headnote to function. Last year’s Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee is the latest and greatest example of the deepening transformation of United States government into a corporate fascist form.

We’re living in an on-going political emergency. The basic institutions of capitalism, corporations, have with certainty and with ample evidence overwhelmed the already limited democratic forms of the United States government. These institutions are only designed to make money. They have not created a cleaner planet. They’re regularly found guilty of criminal behavior. They are largely corrupt even where their actions are technically legal. The world that they sponsored in Future Land and the fantasies that they imagine in their commercials bear absolutely no connection to real life. They are not interested in extending the lives of most citizens. They dominate both political parties, 99% of cable television news, and largely anchor the online news media. The planet is undergoing what Richard E. Leaky and others have called the sixth planetary extinction, and corporations resolutely balk at any definition of sustainability that could dent profits and surplus extraction. It is with relief that one can imagine an impending time, swiftly forthcoming, when a force stronger than their convictions will disabuse them of their numbers.

The Legality of Corporate Designed Neural Hot Spots

It is common to compare the present struggle over obesity and public health to the state tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s. Many articles and pundits believe that the threat to public health by industrial food companies resembles the threat to public health by tobacco companies. 

This comparison may be apt in more ways than one, though. New scientific research shows that chemically and scientifically designed food plays a critical role in the involuntary nervous system. This system is connected to the brain's reward center. Like nicotine in cigarettes, it appears that industrial food contains critical combinations of substances that the brain finds intoxicating and addictive. We know these substance as sugar, fat and salt. This alarming and straightforward information is the subject of the recent book The End of Overeating by David A. Kessler, MD.

Researchers like Kessler have found that industrial food is "hyperpalatable." In other words, it induces eating that happens "outside our awareness" (Kessler 7). In new studies of animal behavior and human brains, eating food appears to be a separate activity than simply nourishing hunger. Scientists and biologists once thought that food regulated hunger in just this way. They used a homeostatic model of regulation to theorize the body's ability to eat and not eat according to when it was necessary. Yet it appears that the biological forces in play during digestion have less to do with the stomach than with the mind.

Since foraging and securing food was a vital task for human beings before the advent of modern food economies, the human brain is wired to motivate eating in the same way that mammal brains wire animals in the wild. Humans and animals rely on emotional rewards for securing food. Emotions are the surest way to motivate behavior, not logic, reason, or even planning. Over time the emotional "reward center" of the brain, which is connected to the release of positive emotional neurochemicals, evolved to connect the most pleasurable chemicals to the substances found least in nature: sugar, fat, and salt. It is a perverse irony of evolution that these same substances are now manufactured cheaply and everywhere. It is not, therefore, a coincidence that food corporations create ever more products with these substances in ever more emotionally rewarding combinations.

Foods that contain these meticulously designed combinations of sugar, fat, and salt are called hyperpalatable. This food stimulates brain circuitry that releases intensely pleasurable neurochemicals, called "opioids," that give bodies a euphoric feeling. They also relieve stress and pain in the body. In study after study in rats, sugar and fat receive the same preferential treatment as cocaine. Dosing oneself with sugar, fat, and salt even has a scientific name: "orosensory self-stimulation" (Kessler 37). When the right combination of sugar, fat, and salt hits the brain, it's called touching the brain's "hot spot" (Kessler 40). This hot spot is the ultimate trigger for the release of opioids into the bloodstream. Hyperpalatable foods are the crack cocaine of the industrial food system.

The human body learns to crave these substances the same way that it craves drugs. Visual cues induce appetite and yearning. Simply seeing foods such as these can set off powerful triggers of desire in the brains of potential eaters. Just like addicts, bodies wired for hyperpalatable foods choose the same locations over and over to "use" them. This conditioned preference for place is common in bodies addicted to nicotine, alcohol, and other drugs. Moreover, over time bodies crave new combinations as the brain comes to "tolerate" certain "tastes." The food industry calls this craving "dynamic contrast." Ice cream must have a hard shell on the outside; pretzels must be added to the ice cream; a powder-sugar coating must be added to a chocolate dip. This lust for variety is the hallmark of addiction. Yet this addiction isn't an analogy, or "like" drug addictions. Industrial food plays the brain the same as other drugs, and it's just as lethal over time.

The health consequences of sugar, fat, and salt are obvious. The human body gains weight and becomes sick from over-eating these substances. Heart disease, obesity, and diabetes have reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The film Food, Inc reports that 1 in 3 children born after the year 2000 will contract early-onset diabetes. The threat to public health is obvious, just as it's obvious that the FDA and the USDA have sided with the industrial food system in the long-term battle over public health versus private profits. Corporations have never been more powerful in US history, or had this much influence over legislation. Therefore new regulatory legislation is just as unlikely to have an effect as it is to be passed by the US Congress.

In Suing the Tobacco and Lead Pigment Industries, Donald G. Gifford reviews the legal frameworks that made it possible for state attorney generals, such as Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore, to begin suing tobacco corporations for harmful products. Overall, Gifford finds that the courts resisted class-action lawsuits brought by ordinary citizens as a way to regulate corporate behavior. It was therefore necessary to have the executive branch, represented by the attorney generals, take on corporate responsibility and malfeasance.

This reveals a precedent for potential new lawsuits, but also a dangerous trend. On the one hand, it is possible to force corporations to take responsiblity for harmful products. On the other hand, the judicial system has essentially nullfied the power of Congress to regulate products -- the executive branch, of all places, is where the last remaining "legal" power of the people resides.

Anticipating the defense of the industrial food corporations is important. In the the tobacco lawsuits, one of the main legal counter-concepts used by the companies to skirt their responsiblity was the common law notion of volenti non fit injuria, or "to a willing person no injury is done." Arguably, people know eating ice cream is bad for them. They know that eating fast food is harmful; they do it anyway. But the new science says that people are addicted to these substances, and use them to self-medicate stress, among other things.

The tobacco corporations lied about nicotine being addictive. This means that the real test for the industrial food corporations is to subpoena them and make them testify about what they know. Do they realize they're designing food people can't stop eating?

Spring Break Extra Credit

Students are not required to write a blog over Spring Break, but those who do so will be awarded extra credit. The blogs must be completed by Friday the 22nd at 11.59 pm.

ASSIGNMENT: For this assignment, students should connect a personal experience or memory to an issue from class. Students may write about their experiences in the food industry as a consumer or as a worker. They may write about their personal reaction to the material we have studied. They may write about a story a friend or family member told them that is relevant. Somewhere in the blog the student must be clear about the meaning of their connection, and how it directly connects with an issue from the class reading or discussion.

Class for Next Week

Students: You will have a guest professor tomorrow show you a movie for class. Take notes. Your reading for next week is on blackboard. You will have to print it out and bring it to class Monday. If you can only print out ONE of the readings, print out the second of the Klare chapters, "Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet." I will bring both readings for class and both will inform our discussions for the week.

Profits, Not Unions

In Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser comments upon three seemingly disparate facts about the fast food industry. First, cattle are grown fast and large, and are sometimes fed cattle blood, chickens, chicken manure, pigs, sawdust, and newspaper. Companies feed cattle these bodies, feces, and trash due to the high cost of (subsidized) grain.
 Once this meat reaches the retail fast food chains, it’s reheated by deskilled workers. These workers aren’t allowed to unionize for more benefits, higher wages, or more control. In the late 60s and early 1970s, McDonald’s went to great lengths to abort the presence of unions in their franchises. Sometimes in these restauraunts workplace safety became an issue, given the unregulated conditions. The leading cause of death among women in the restauraunt industry in the 1990s, for example, was homicide – murder. But restauraunt associations fought off more regulation and safety inspections from OSHA, the government agency charged with protecting workers.

These three examples discuss the importance of profits for fast food companies. Anything that could jeprodize profits, such as costly regulations, are thought to be destructive to the financial health of those companies. The companies themselves would probably say that two things are at stake: the ultimate price of the food products, such as burgers, and the ultimate amount of money the company can return to its shareholders, who own stock in the company and expect a return on their investment. The political philosophy underpinning this belief is one of “free markets,” or business freedom that is unregulated by government interference or laws.

The Controlling Mentality

The documentary Food, Inc by Robert Kenner reveals the link between the psychology of control and the exploitation of workers and animals by the industrial food system. The organic farmer Joel Salatin puts it best, perhaps, when he says that the same “controlling mentality” that sees the pig as “matter” will also view workers and other human beings in the same light (Food, Inc). In short, the controlling mentality he mentions is one that sees life itself as matter to be converted into capital, into profit, into dollars, and whatever system of production that best serves that purpose is therefore justified.

In the film, we can see this mentality at work when a hidden camera turns to a hog plant in North Carolina. The pigs are shuffled into the butcher lines, and the workers are shuffled into police vans – they are, after all, illegal immgrants. Despite being brought to the United States at the request of the meatpacking companies, in this case the Smithfield meatpacking corporation strikes a deal with local law enforcement to make token arrests under the cover of darkness. They will not raid the factories themselves and stop production.

The irony of this controlling mentality is that we can never quite see it; just like the Tyson chicken corporation, the Smithfield corporatoin refuses to be interviewed on camera. It may be most terrifying, one imagines, to realize that should the company become visible the public relations officer might look just like you or me.  

Control, Profit, & Power

The fast food companies rely on meatpacking companies to generate the food products consumers will purchase. They know that meat products must be uniform and cheap. In order to keep meat products cheap the meatpacking corporations exert acute control over the production process. Their power comes from this control, and this power leads directly to real material profits.

First, the companies act as an oligopsony: a group of buyers that have enormous power of cattle ranchers because they are few and the ranchers many (117). Additionally, the meatpacking companies have “captive” cattle supplies to put downward pressure on cattle prices when ranchers go above their desired price. Once the meat has been processed, the final costs are kept down by the fast food companies themselves. They hire “marginalized workers,” or vulnerable workers that are disabled, immigrants, or elderly (71). Paid with a minimum wage, these workers can’t complain out of desperation. They serve the meat products to consumers, and lack better choices.


Composed with Maurice, Luis, & Tynaisha