[Peace-discuss] American alienation

[C. G. Estabrook]

[An interesting review form a rather conservative British
columnist. --CGE]

Downsizing dreams

Polly Toynbee is aghast at the fat-cat culture that has
overtaken the world as revealed in Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait
and Switch and Stewart Lansley's Rich Britain

Saturday April 8, 2006
The Guardian

Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream, by
Barbara Ehrenreich (256pp, Granta, £9.99)
Rich Britain: The Rise and Rise of the New Super-wealthy, by
Stewart Lansley (265pp, Politico's, £18.99)

How extraordinarily misleading economic statistics can be.
Talk of "average" earnings or "per capita" wealth is virtually
meaningless as a true description of a nation: if Bill Gates
moved to Albania it would soar up the league tables without a
single Albanian being a penny better off. This mendacity has
never been more grotesque than in the US right now. The myth
of America the thriving, booming, prospering envy of the world
is most chillingly exposed in the writings of Barbara
Ehrenreich. How she strips away the varnish to reveal the
lives of the slaves toiling beneath the surface to prop up a
curiously hollowed-out empire.

In her most celebrated book, Nickel and Dimed, she took jobs
among minimum wage workers, living in a caravan and a motel,
failing to survive on $7 an hour. It left the British reader
aghast at a far more brutal capitalism, redder in tooth and
claw with no safety nets, no health care, no social security.
Only charity food parcels stave off starvation for people
doing America's essential work, sometimes two or three jobs at
once in the richest nation the world has ever known.

Now, Ehrenreich turns her razor-sharp reporting skills on the
corporate world. She sets out with suit and briefcase to join
business America, the offices of middle management to which
most graduates aspire. Unfortunately she doesn't make the
grade in the white collar world. As a reporter, this might
have been a failed enterprise, a dead story. After all, she is
not a good prospect. She is in her 50s, has never worked in
business before and aspires to become a PR in the
pharmaceutical sector. Even with a good deal of lying and
friends to proffer references, frankly, it looks from the
start like a doomed enterprise. By the end she concludes the
only way she will get near the management suites is pushing a
catering trolley.

But Ehrenreich is the kind of reporter who could be put down
just about anywhere and always come up with revelations and
perceptions of the society around her, its people, their hopes
and fears. So as she surfs the job boards on the net, rewrites
her CV over and over, networks her way to follow every
improbable lead towards the chance of a job, she finds herself
down among the many fallers from corporate America. It is not
just those who start out poor and uneducated who are destined
to plunge into the abyss: it could be almost anyone.

Downsizing after mergers, the arrival of a new manager or the
constant cult of cuts keep managers on their toes. If they are
"let go" and don't find another job fast, many, maybe most,
are doomed to tumble down the social ladder. She meets them at
expensive and futile networking conferences and motivational
job search events. But a gap on a resumé - never called
unemployed but "in transition" or "consulting" - is CV death.
Most job applications receive no acknowledgment. From outside
the office citadels become increasingly impregnable. Once hot
personal contacts go cold, these fallers have no chance.

But America the entrepreneurial has spotted a market here.
These desperate people are preyed on by a whole industry of
obnoxious (and themselves pretty desperate) career-coaches,
"professional mentors" and trainers offering excruciating
pop-psychology: reinvent yourself; smile. The psycho-babble of
business spills into a kind of bullying, yet these frantic
job-seekers shell out a fortune to receive it: it's their
fault, their future is in their hands, there is nothing wrong
the system, the only failings are all their own. Tragically,
most sink into exactly the despair the career coaches say
makes them unemployable. Many end up taking minimum wage jobs.
Europe could do that tomorrow, if we abandoned social security
to starve people into sub-subsistence jobs.

The American dream is so powerful that even those living the
nightmare still believe it. Ehrenreich often uncovers this
depressing phenomenon in her rich portfolio of reporting
America. She picks away at a brain-washed multitude clinging
to a false idol. Without political leadership to suggest that
the dream is all but dead and aspirational social mobility
stuck in cement, the millions at the sharp end ignore the
evidence of their own experience to believe still that anyone
can make it. Those who don't are just failures.

Only Ehrenreich's acid wit and caustic political intelligence
makes this an enjoyable as well as a horrible read. But if you
are in the mood for dark humourless mirth, then Rich Britain
makes a good accompaniment. Stewart Lansley charts the
progress of inequality at the top. The super rich are a new
phenomenon whose fortunes took off in the 1980s and kept
soaring. The late 70s were the most equal period Britain has
ever known, a time when the onward march of social progress
and fairer shares was taught in every classroom as if it were
historical inevitability, from factory acts and boys up
chimneys to universal education and health. What went wrong?

This is a journalistic book, with more cuttings than original
research, but it does the business. Well written and well
analysed, it revolts and disgusts with tales of squalid greed
at the top. All the statistics and the hard facts are there -
how it happened, why it happened and how we are destined,
unless someone stops it, to watch the pigs in the farmhouse
continue to wallow in excess beyond the dreams of a Nero.

The stratosphere of the boardrooms, where the likes of Lord
Browne of BP now earn £6.5m a year, has moved as far from the
life of the average citizen as the addict in a blanket under
Waterloo bridge. They no longer inhabit the same planet as the
rest of us, hermetically sealed in smoke-windowed limo,
private jet, private island, private everything. Yet they are
more driven by the politics of envy than any mere socialist.
They are driven on and on by that gross desire to be top dog,
with top dollar, bigger bonuses than the boardroom next door,
fatter jet and more richly bejewelled arm candy. Read this,
keep it, store up some of its more pungent statistics and keep
asking Labour what it's there for, if never to say enough is
enough?

· Polly Toynbee's Hard Work is published by Bloomsbury