patrick.net

“Let us linger over the perversity,” he writes in “Why Millions of Ordinary Americans Support Donald Trump,” one of the seventeen component essays in Rendezvous with Oblivion: “Let us linger over the perversity.

Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America — one of our two monopoly parties — chose long ago to turn its back on these people’s concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a ‘creative class’ that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps” (p. 178).
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The class that now runs the so-called Party of the People is impoverishing the people; the genius value-creators at Amazon and Google and Uber are Robber Barons, although, one must grant, hipper, cooler, and oh so much more innovative than their historical predecessors. “In reality,” Frank writes in Listen, Liberal,

….there is little new about this stuff except the software, the convenience, and the spying. Each of the innovations I have mentioned merely updates or digitizes some business strategy that Americans learned long ago to be wary of. Amazon updates the practices of Wal-Mart, for example, while Google has dusted off corporate behavior from the days of the Robber Barons. What Uber does has been compared to the every-man-for-himself hiring procedures of the pre-union shipping docks…. Together, as Robert Reich has written, all these developments are ‘the logical culmination of a process that began thirty years ago when corporations began turning over full-time jobs to temporary workers, independent contractors, free-lancers, and consultants.’ This is atavism, not innovation…. And if we keep going in this direction, it will one day reduce all of us to day laborers, standing around like the guys outside the local hardware store, hoping for work. (p. 215).

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/09/read-book-itll-make-radical-conversation-thomas-frank.html