E-mail a friendBenjamin Barber
airdate March 18, 2008
Benjamin Barber is a noted political theorist who consults regularly with institutions and leaders in the U.S. and Europe. He's a senior fellow at Demos and president-director of CivWorld at Demos, the international NGO that sponsors Interdependence Day and the Paradigm Project. His books include Jihad vs. McWorld and Consumed. Barber also co-wrote the prize-winning CBS/PBS series, The Struggle for Democracy. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard and was a founding editor of the distinguished international journal, Political Theory.
Benjamin Barber
Tavis: Dr. Benjamin Barber is a renowned political theorist and president of CivWorld, the driving force behind the annual Interdependence Day conference. He's also a bestselling author whose latest book is called "Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole." It is now out in paperback. He joins us tonight from New York City. Dr. Ben Barber, as always, an honor to have you on the program.
Benjamin Barber: Tavis, so great to be with you again.
Tavis: I want to cover as much as I can in the time that we have; certainly the stuff that's happening with our markets right about now or stuff not happening, as it were, with our markets. But let me start with the book first, "Consumed." Again, now out in paperback. The book essentially is talking about what capitalism was and what it has become. What is the difference? What's the transition?
Barber: Well, capitalism, once upon a time, was a remarkable formula in which people produced goods and services that folks really needed, and on the way to selling them those services and products, made a profit. And they made a profit based on actually serving human needs, creating prosperity, and really making a better world.
In the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th century, that's what happened. Partly because capitalism has become so successful, though, nowadays, at least in the developed world and the developed part of the developing world, we have satisfied so many of those needs that nowadays capitalism seems not to be busy not manufacturing goods to meet real needs but manufacturing needs to sell all the goods it has, that whether or not we need them, whether or not we can afford them, whether or not we want them.
Tavis: So how do markets today - let's take this subtitle right quick and break it down before I get to the news of the day - again, where the economy is concerned, how do the markets today corrupt children?
Barber: Well, if they've got to sell a whole lot more stuff than any of us want, they've got to sell to children. They have to go after children, whether it's sodas in public school, which make kids both obese and malnourished at the same time; whether it's gadgets and Internet connections for kids way before they understand it; whether it's trying to sell brands to 2-year-olds and 1-year-olds.
A television station like Baby First TV, intended for toddlers and 6-month-old and year-olds. It's really about pushing the gatekeepers, who are the parents, aside and getting at the kids and turning them into little brand consumers, and that's deeply corrupting.
Tavis: So the markets, you say, corrupt children, they infantilize adults. By that, you mean?
Barber: Well, I mean by that they also have to dumb down the adults. Prudent adults know what they need and don't need, and they shop only for what they need. But if that's what they did, they wouldn't buy all the stuff being put out there. So what you've got to do is turn adults into grasping youngsters who say,
"Gimme, gimme, gimme" and "I want, I want" like a kid in a candy store.
And they work very hard at dumbing down taste by making films geared to 14 and 15-year-old boys and 15 and 14-year-old girls, they make games and gadgets and they target 20 and 30-somethings with that. In effect, they try to dumb down adults and turn into grasping consumers, they try to sell people things they don't want, but also that they can't afford, and of course that brings us right to the subprime housing market crisis.
Tavis: And before we jump into that, then you argue, of course, that as citizens, we just get swallowed whole.
Barber: Well we do, because it's as citizens that we act prudently to deal with the public consequences of our private decisions. As a consumer, we buy an awful lot of automobiles, waste a lot of gasoline. We make the country oil-dependent, we make it green-unfriendly, we make it involved in wars in the Middle East.
As citizens, we can deal with the social and ecological consequences of our purchases as private consumers. But Tavis, we've just lived through 30 years of privatization, of saying, "We don't need government, the market will do it all - just be a good consumer; you don't have to be a citizen." And on the way to doing that, we've disempowered ourselves of the real civic power to make social choices about the social consequences of all those private consumer decisions we made.
Tavis: So to your point now, Dr. Barber, about citizens being disempowered, there are a number of economic issues to throw at you. Let me do them one at a time. I start with the one you've already raised. Your take, sir, on this subprime housing crisis.
Barber: Well again, a capitalism that produces a lot more than people actually need and tries to sell people things either they don't want or maybe they need but can't afford went about its business trying to talk an awful lot of hardworking Americans into buying property and houses they couldn't really afford. And they did it by saying, "We're going to give you a special adjustable rate mortgage. It's only going to cost you $600 a month for the first year or 18 months or two years."
But of course being an adjustable rate mortgage, having gotten a very good subprime mortgage to start with, year later, two years later, it jumps up two, three points. Suddenly it's not $600 a month but $900 a month, $1,200 a month. The family can't afford it anymore and the house gets foreclosed on. That created a fundamental crisis in housing.
A lot of people were sold stuff they can't afford, the rates went up with the adjustable rate, and suddenly we had a finance crisis that not only took away a lot of people's homes but put the banks and the hedge funds and the folks who had been making all of these bad decisions, put them into a situation where they actually - the banks themselves - became imperiled as well.
Tavis: Which leads to the issue of Bear Stearns. We've all been reading, of course, about the feds taking over Bear Stearns and the role JPMorgan Chase is playing in that. Your read on the news that we all woke up to in the last day or so?
Barber: Well you see, a long time ago, when capitalism was working the way it was supposed to, as we talked about at the top of the show, a firm that made bad investments would be allowed to go under. It wouldn't make profits, it would take risks, and it would go under. But today it's impossible for the big boys to go bust because the government says we can't afford to have Bear Stearns and other big banking financial firms go under, so we're going to support them up.
But the trouble is the little guys - the homeowners, the people who took those mortgages - they're allowed to go under. So tax dollars are being used to prop up the big banks because we "Can't afford to let them go under," while at the same time all the small homeowners, the trailer owners, the property owners who took those subprime mortgages, who are now seeing their homes taken away, they are left, hung out to dry.
Capitalism is working just the wrong way. We've socialized risk - no big bank can go bust - but at the same time, we're not protecting the little guy.
Tavis: What does the little guy, what do citizens do about that? Because again, the government comes to the rescue and you're right, it has happened time and time again. We can talk about Bear Stearns today or Chrysler back in the day, but what does the little guy - this is an election season now, and everybody's running for the White House, and nobody can get there without the support of the little guy.
It takes our votes, those of us referred to as "we the people," to put them in the Oval Office, but the people, to your point, are getting screwed, and the big boys are getting bailed out.
Barber: Well exactly right, Tavis, and we've got to take back our citizenship. And that doesn't just mean, although it certainly means that, voting for candidates who are going to fix this system and insist that our tax dollars be used to help the people who are threatened by the mortgage crisis, not to bail out all the guys who made the bad loans to start with.
But it also means taking our politics, our citizenship, seriously, beyond just voting. One of the things that's happened with this kind of commodification of everything is that even the candidates, and we have good candidates out there, are forced to sell themselves like commodities, like brands.
We get Hillary Clinton now is Madame Experience, and Barack Obama is Mr. Hope and Mr. Change. And we can't just use slogans. We have to face the realities of a complex, interdependent economy where banks, financial institutions, and hedge funds are hurting the little guy, and the little guy needs more than slogans to fix that.
Tavis: Got about a minute to go. Speaking of Obama and Clinton and McCain, let me get your quick assessment on the guy currently still sitting in the White House. What's your read on how he's reading what's wrong with the economy, or put another way, what's not wrong with the economy? What's your read of how he's reading this?
Barber: Well, this is one of the most illiterate men in the world in every way. He is not reading it because he's illiterate. And I don't mean by that he can't read words; I mean he can't read the economy, he can't read the American people. He can't read real suffering. He's not talking about the real issues at all. So any change, frankly, even McCain, would be a vast improvement.
But we've got to change the administration. We have to put into the White House people who understand the economy in an interdependent world, has to protect consumers, has to protect producers, has to protect little guys. And to do that means we have to get off the consumption bottle. Right now, we're trying to fix the consumer crisis and the big deficit by in effect priming the pump - giving people more to spend, putting checks in their hand. That's like giving an alcoholic a bottle - it's the wrong way.
Tavis: His book, out in paperback now, a bestseller. Dr. Benjamin Barber, author of "Jihad versus McWorld." The new one, "Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole." Dr. Barber, good to see you, sir. We'll talk again.
Barber: Great to talk to you, Tavis.
Tavis: Take care.
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