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.
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