Wall Street, the Election, and the Pit Bull Plague

Shoshana Zuboff asks if we are ready to end the pit bull politics and economics that have brought our country to its knees

By Shoshana Zuboff

I like my lipstick, but I hope that's not what distinguishes me from a pit bull. With two kids playing on different soccer teams, there's a game to watch nearly every day. In the zero-sum world of pit bull politics you root for one team and jeer its opponents. I do cheer like crazy for my kids and their teammates, but I also applaud when kids on the other team play beautifully or show great sportsmanship. I know that if both teams are good, each team will be even better. Their fates are linked.

The current financial crisis underscores just how linked all of our fates are. His mortgage, my 401(k), her job, his student loan, your credit line, her store: We are an intricate set of dominoes that stand or fall together, along with people like us all over the world. The fate of each of us redounds to the fate of all of us. We are a community, not a collection of isolated individuals. Yet too many subprime loans were made to people regarded as expendable. Chew 'em up. Spit 'em out. I call it pit bull economics. Now their calamity has become our shared adversity. As it turns out, no one is expendable.

When I began this column last January, I wrote about the call for epochal leadership (BusinessWeek.com, 1/31/08). I argued that the surge in Senator Barack Obama's campaign was an expression of our need for reunion. We need to be reunited with the public and private institutions that betrayed and abandoned us as they pursued the narrow self interests of those in command. We need to be reunited with one another, as that very betrayal now requires us to come together to tackle old problems in wholly new ways.

Yearning for Collective Spirit

I believed then, as I do now, that Barack Obama represents our hopes for a leader who can help us move beyond the degraded era of a zero-sum society and set the stage for a realignment of our institutions with the interests of our people. These last months have more fully revealed the extent to which we have been betrayed by those upon whom we depended. The pit bull politics of the George W. Bush Administration and the pit bull economics of Wall Street have brought our country to its knees. Dismay and outrage have intensified the yearning for a renewal of our collective spirit in the face of so much economic and political violence.

Yet in the past few weeks of the campaign, John McCain and Sarah Palin have chosen to crank up their inner pit bulls with a final blast of stubborn, self-absorbed denial. McCain operatives swarmed the body politic in a fevered attempt to find that open sore through which they might enter the bloodstream and stake a truth-resistant claim.

In the meantime, Senator McCain and Governor Palin busied themselves digging up Joe McCarthy's rotting corpse. When a new analysis of Federal Reserve data shows that the top 5% of the income ladder now owns nearly 70% of all the non-home wealth, McCain tries to persuade us that modest tax increases (BusinessWeek.com, 10/22/08) at the top of the wealth pyramid are "socialism."

And while the government's own General Accounting Office reports that two-thirds of American corporations pay no taxes, Senator McCain says Obama's proposal for corporate tax increases reveals a radical plan to "redistribute the wealth." Not to be outdone, Sarah Palin announced that those who don't agree with her are "anti-American."

McCain's panic at the prospect of political defeat redefined him for many Americans, exposing him as a politician all too eager to betray the values that once set him apart. It's common knowledge that he was one of the few Republican senators to oppose the Bush tax cuts. And it's well-known that he has hired some of the Republican dirty tricksters responsible for circulating vicious lies about him and his family back in the 2000 South Carolina primaries—people about whom he once said there was "a special place in hell." Senator McCain's Faustian pact with his own ambition now includes a long list of such reversals.

McCain's Panic

In his first pamphlet, The Crisis, America's greatest "columnist," Thomas Paine, implored American colonists to unite against the economic and political violence of British rule rather than scatter in panic. But he also observed the instructive value of panic when he wrote that "panics, in some cases, have their uses…. They are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered…. They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world." Like alcohol, panic extracts the truth. Panic sent John McCain lurching like a blinded Cyclops. It forged his final rallying cry and distilled his message to each citizen: "Me First!"

Do the simultaneous downward spirals of our economy and the McCain campaign finally proclaim an end to the reckless violence of pit bull economics and pit bull politics? Both depend upon a ruthless savaging of "the other." But that "otherness" is an illusion. The self-interest of each of us depends upon the interests of all of us. There are no "others"—only more of us.

Like Obama, Paine saw that only a people united by their common interests—not divided by narrow self interest—can transform their shared destiny. "Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it…. The far and the near, the home counties and the back, the rich and the poor, will suffer or rejoice alike."

Rejoice they did, as British tyranny gave rise to a new union. Will it be told that the suffering unleashed by years of pit bull politics and pit bull economics finally united us again? This much is certain—that suffering has illuminated the threads that tightly bind us.

This is the real world wide web, and we ignore it at our peril.

Shoshana Zuboff is the author of The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. She was the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.