Fareed Zakaria’s Manifesto
Deep down we all have a Puritan belief that unless they suffer a good dose of pain, they will not truly repent. In fact, there has been much pain, especially in the financial industry, where tens of thousands of jobs, at all levels, have been lost. But fundamentally, markets are not about morality. They are large, complex systems, and if things get stable enough, they move on.
via Zakaria: A Capitalist Manifesto | Newsweek Business | Newsweek.com.
From a distance I’ve always vaguely admired the skills of Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, who is maybe this country’s preeminent propagandist. Any writer who doesn’t admire what this guy does is probably not being honest with himself, because being the public face of conventional wisdom is an extremely difficult job — and as a man of letters Zakaria routinely succeeds, or pseudo-succeeds, at the most seemingly impossible literary tasks, making the sensational seem dull, the outrageous commonplace, and rendering horrifying absolutes ambigious and full of gray areas.
Wheras most writers grow up dreaming of using their talents to stir up the passions, to inflame and amuse and inspire, Zakaria shoots for the opposite effect, taking controversial and explosive topics and trying to help rattled readers somehow navigate their way through them to yawns, lower heart rates, and states of benign unconcern. He’s back at it again with a new piece about the financial crisis called “The Capitalist Manifesto,” which is one of the first serious attempts at restoring the battered image of global capitalism in the mainstream press.
This writer has done work like this before, using a big canvas to rework an uncooperative chunk of history in the wake of a crisis. Zakaria is probably best known for his post 9/11 “Why Do They Hate Us?” article, a sort of masterpiece of milquetoast propaganda that laid the intellectual foundation for a wide array of important War on Terror popular misconceptions, not the least of which being the whole “They hate us for our freedom” idea. One of Zakaria’s central arguments in that piece was that poor struggling Arabs were driven to envious violence by the endless pop-culture reminders of American affluence and progress. It was just too much to take, seeing all those cool blue jeans and all that great satellite TV.
In one exchange in that piece Zakaria talks with an elderly Arab intellectual who scoffs at Zakaria’s suggestion that Arab cities should try to be more like globalization-friendly capitals like Singapore, Seoul and Hong Kong. The old Arab protests that those cities are just cheap imitations of Houston and Dallas, and what great and ancient civilization would want that?
I thought the old Arab’s comment was funny, but Zakaria imbued it with serious significance. “This disillusionment with the West,” he wrote, “is at the heart of the Arab problem.” And while witty Arab potshots at tacky southern strip-mall meccas like Houston were significant enough to put high up in Newsweek’s seminal piece about the root causes of 9/11, things like America’s habitual toppling of sovereign Arab governments and installation of ruthless dictators like the Shah of Iran were left out more or less entirely (Zakaria managed to write a whole section on the Iranian revolution without even mentioning that the Shah come to power thanks to a CIA-backed overthrow of democratically-elected Mohammed Mosaddeq, whose crime was ejecting Western oil companies from Iran).
Not that Osama bin Laden and his followers aren’t all homicidal lunatics who should be doused in barbecue sauce and tossed in a shark tank, but Zakaria’s piece did a monstrous disservice to Americans by glazing over the sources of Arab anger. He portrayed America’s enemies as jealous dupes, who chose to swallow the religious extremism fed to them by those opportunistic mullahs who stepped into the power vacuum left by ineffectual socialist strongmen like Nasser. (The neat rhetorical trick of making the current political bogeyman, Islamic terrorism, a descendant of the last political bogeyman, socialism, should not go unnoticed by admirers of the propaganda art).
As is the case with almost everything Zakaria writes, there was a grain of truth in such a portrait, but it had the convenient benefit of almost completely absolving America of wrongdoing in the ongoing Shakespearean death-struggle for oil that is recent Middle Eastern history. Appallingly, Zakaria even compared America’s bloodlusting pursuit of Middle Eastern resources (a history that includes numerous CIA-backed coups and more than one brutal war) to the frolicking of Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby — ie toppling governments and arming Saddam Hussein against Iran is like a bunch of ginned-up rich folk knocking over the china. “America has not been venal in the Arab world,” he wrote. “But it has been careless.”
Zakaria’s Capitalist Manifesto is another such grandly fuzzy apologia, a broad exercise in shifting any blame for a big crisis away from a certain unblamable segment of society, only this one is much worse. In his take on the financial crisis he offers a few basic points:
- Gosh it sucks that the crisis happened, but it’s not as bad as people say. Remember how people used to pick on Internet stocks — well, look at Twitter!
- The solution to what ails capitalism is more capitalism.
- There will be a great public desire to tighten up the laws governing the economic sector, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves!
- You know what’s a great idea? Voluntary self-regulation.
- You can make all sorts of interesting collages just using a bunch of dollar bills and a Photoshop program.
- If we could just all learn to be better people, everything will turn out fine.
His description of the root causes of this financial crisis are about what you’d expect from a man who invoked
The Great Gatsby to explain the mentality of the murderer of 4,000 people. When he mentions the objectionable behaviors that led to the loss of trillions of dollars in wealth and untold numbers of lost jobs and misery, he does so with distant, clinical language, like he’s describing something seen through a telescope, disappearing over the horizon. In fact his method of describing the “moral crisis” that led to the financial implosion was to begrudgingly admit that many people were less than nice. Here’s how he put it:
Most of what happened over the past decade across the world was legal. Bankers did what they were allowed to do under the law. Politicians did what they thought the system asked of them. Bureaucrats were not exchanging cash for favors. But very few people acted responsibly, honorably or nobly (the very word sounds odd today). This might sound like a small point, but it is not. No system—capitalism, socialism, whatever—can work without a sense of ethics and values at its core. No matter what reforms we put in place, without common sense, judgment and an ethical standard, they will prove inadequate. We will never know where the next bubble will form, what the next innovations will look like and where excesses will build up. But we can ask that people steer themselves and their institutions with a greater reliance on a moral compass.
This is a beautiful piece of writing. Describing the misdeeds of Wall Street in the last decade by saying “few people acted… nobly” is sort of like saying that Stalin was “not always sociable” or O.J. Simpson was “not always committed to preserving life.” I mean, talk about a freaking understatement. Forgetting entirely the other insane lies in this passage (my favorite being the one about bureuacrats not taking cash for favors — I guess he means except for Bob Rubin taking $130 million or whatever from Citi after pushing through that merger), that “not so noble” bit is where Zakaria earns his money.
Because if you get into the actual gory details of what went on in those years, there’s just no way you come out of that story not wanting to see every banker on Wall Street strung up by his testicles. The crimes of this era were monstrous thieveries, committed against ordinary people in a highly systematic and organized fashion with the aid and compliance of a bought-off government, and the only way you can not perceive what happened as a profound indictment of capitalism is if you blow off the specifics entirely and try to hide the details in vague, airy words like “irresponsibility” and “excesses.”
Because the specifics matter. It’s one thing to say that Citi wasted some of the money taxpayers sent its way via the bailout; it’s another thing to say Citi wasted some of the taxpayers’ money by upholstering the pillows on the private jet Sandy Weill took to Mexico over Christmas vacation with Hermes scarves. It’s one thing to say Wall Street bankers felt pressure to chase profits; it’s another thing to say they achieved those profits by systematically robbing a whole generation of pensioners and working-class homeowners, under the noses of the politicians they bought with tens of millions in campaign contributions.
Zakaria works hard to tell the crisis story minus these outrageous details. Then he goes on to argue that, basically, nothing should be done. He says we mostly just need a “gut check”; we, all of us, need to rediscover that little voice in all of us that says, “if it doesn’t feel right, we shouldn’t be doing it.” I mean, that is actually what he wrote. No one needs to go to jail, we don’t need to worry about who’s to blame, we just need, you know, do a better job using our trusty moral compasses to navigate the seas of life. It’s classic Zakaria in the sense that he attacks ugly political phenomena with tired cliches and hack pablum until you’re almost too bored to keep your eyes open, then in the end reduces it all to a dumbed-down t-shirt that carries us forward to another cycle of political inaction: Laissez-faire capitalism doesn’t rip off people, people rip off people! Amazing stuff — God bless him.
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A similar dynamic runs through the whole of the corporate media. They must run seminars and/or work shops to achieve this uniformity.
It looked more original when he paraphrased in 5,000 words the eight words utterances of inarticulate boob than when he does the same with the two or three complete sentences the current POTUS speaks his carefully crafted lies.
Can this become the first in a series where you rail into deluded CNN commentators? Roland Martin deserves to be taken out behind the barn and, well…
Finally, someone mentions Zakaria and his bs. I remember the first time I saw him on the Daily Show a few years back and thought “what a reasonable guy.” That turned out to be the problem. As Matt points out, he casually and calmly defends everything that is wrong with our society at the moment–whether it was his defense of Bush a few years ago in Newsweek or the capitalist manifesto piece Matt mentions–Zakaria exists only to serve power. To be fair to Zakaria however, what else do we expect from mainstream media outlets? They exist because they don’t rock the boat, and Zakaria is perhaps the best example of this.
wouldn’t it be amazing if we had a major political party in this country who actually had ANYTHING resembling a populist message (my definition of populist being “anything that doesn’t feature the rich fucking the middle class in the ass”)?
instead we have one party whose replacing of adam smith with milton friedman has teed us up, and another party whose soul was sold to wall street in exchange for a solipsistic relevance (in a world where only money matters, might as well get some money so you can get in there and not change the fact that only money matters ad absurdum)…well, in that real world you are inevitably going to end up with the rich controlling everything and stealing the china.
and fareed is a useful idiot to the wealthy, given elite access in exchange for not rocking any conventional wise boats. the sad part is trying to explain why he sucks so much to a mainstream liberal audience who are inclined to give him (and friedman) the benefit of the doubt. matt, you provide the ammunition that makes it so much easier and for that i salute you.
[...] It’s from last week, but Fareed Zakari’s Newsweek capitalist manifesto is worth your time (as is Matt Taibbi’s characteristically sarcastic – and occasionally profane – take down at True/Slant). [...]
good take down. This one has been a long time coming. Zakaria is the most tedious, annoying boob on television. I don’t know why, but his show really rubs me the wrong way. it’s like being trapped in a terrible second year Poli Sci tutorial.
Until today, I had never thought of Zakaria as an Ellsworth Toohey, but you’ve made a strong case…I promise to never reference that awful novel on T/S again.
Thanks for the Zakaria take down — it’s long overdue. I don’t think he quite hit the same level on the BS meter here as he did with his “Why They Hate Us” essay, but he came very close.
Actually, Zakaria’s analysis is even weirder than you say. The real question is, how can any system run if it depends on people being honorable, noble, etc.? He has it exactly backward. You have to arrange matters on the assumption that people will act like a**holes, some people, anyway.
I should have added, hasn’t he ever read the Federalist Papers?
The fact that you have so much that Zakaria lacks is appealing Matt. You get angry, rightfully so, and you don’t do favors, rightfully so, and you lay out all the facts you have, rightfully so. At the same time, because of who he is, he gets so much more information. No one gets an interview with people they spend most of their time trashing. Heck, those trashed people probably wouldn’t even forward along a press release. It is a little tricky, but Zakaria could at least try to push the envelope.
A few years ago, I would’ve agreed with you 100%.
Zakaria always was that one guy that American media would bring on to say, “Look, even one of theirs [Muslims] agrees with us that these Arabs just need to be brought in line with some bombs and guns! He’s not decrying our foreign policy, he’s here to tell us how great we are!”
Rarely did the guy ever take Muslim/Arab public opinion very seriously, and he wrote article after article in defense of the general Bush-floated idea that we should be remaking the world at the barrel of a gun, because we have an awesome system of governance that we need to export everywhere.
He bought the Bush PR campaign of a foreign policy hook, line, and sinker. The worst criticisms he would throw at the President were the kind of technocratic, John Kerry ones.
Today I agree you with 90% instead of 100%.
Why? Because his CNN show actually is one of the few places on the airwaves where we can see educated and open-minded people debating foreign policy issues. And I think Zakaria himself has opened up a lot, too. But I groaned when I saw his Newsweek cover story a little while ago. He’s obviously channeling his Bush-era self in it.
Okay, but isn’t he a nice change from the talking heads mouthing hyperboles, shouting condemnations, sneering accusations, and just plain ranting and raving?
Fareed Zakaria has always been great at this sort of exercise, it’s the very reason he became the editor at Newsweek. But that’s not why I ended up registering to comment.
Your remark regarding the Shah of Iran and sovereign Arab nations is utterly off the mark given that Iran is a Shiite and Persian country and of very little (positive) concern to its Arab neighbors, who view it as a rival at best and an enemy at worst, and this no matter who’s in charge.
If anything, the Shah was easier to come to an agreement with for the Arab countries (the Algiers agreement and the eventual resolution of the Bahrain crisis come to mind) than the Mullahs which followed.
I won’t even touch the “democratically elected” myth that surrounds Mossadegh, a man whose short rule mostly operated under the banner of self-granted emergency powers and arbitrary decrees. You’re good Taibbi, but even you can prove quick to rely on these journalistic cliches.
Zakaria is yet another Beltway enabler who buys access by defending the weathly elite who run this country and rob the rest of us. As a recovering jouranlist myself, I greatly admire Matt’s straightforward reporting of the Meltdown and who’s really responsible. We need more like him in the mainstream media.
Now, if I could only get my republican mother (never made more than $35,000 a year) to understand that it’s the robber barons who are ripping us off and not the evil liberals. It’s not about politics, it’s about money. Same as it ever was.
[...] Fareed Zakaria’s Manifesto: n one exchange in that piece Zakaria talks with an elderly Arab intellectual who scoffs at Zakaria’s suggestion that Arab cities should try to be more like globalization-friendly capitals like Singapore, Seoul and Hong Kong. The old Arab protests that those cities are just cheap imitations of Houston and Dallas, and what great and ancient civilization would want that? [...]
Well done…TKO in 20 paragraphs or less!
[...] You know, even when I don’t agree with Taibbi, I respect him more than most journalists. He’s perhaps the only major player who bothers to make the connection between government policies and the effect they have on regular citizens – and is really, really angry as a result. Yes, behind all that snark beats a bleeding heart. (How can you not love this?) [...]
Jesus Christ that was satisfying. Your final flourish, in which you articulate how Zakariah ( really, all of establishment media) defaults to a t-shirt was fantastic.
I think it’s time to ask whether establishment media conforms quite nicely to recent studies on incompetency. The incompetent are uniquely unsuited to see their own, repeating, deficiencies.
G
uh, hate to call the cops on this raucous bash, but the tune of ‘hail Tiabbi’ has lost its novelty for me, and i feel its time we all sober up.
without the Fed’s easy credit early this decade, the current financial mess never would have occurred. got that? put your drinks down, i hear sirens. instead of correctly allowing recession to set in, and purge the tech bubble excesses from our system, the Fed instead went on ANOTHER easy money binge. in case you didn’t realize, easy credit caused the tech bubble too.
where do you think all the money came from that fueled the excesses of the real estate bubble????
your friends are screwing in my mom & dad’s room, and they need to gtfo cuz there’s red and blue lights flashing outside now.
yea, wall street’s in bed with our federal government. and you conclude that capitalism is to blame? this isn’t capitalism. the oligarchs on wall street rose to power NOT because they were so damn good at free market competition. no, that kind of sickening influence only happens with government help. capitalism isn’t about bureaucrats picking winners.
this is a political problem and wall street and the government have every incentive to continue the cornholing. which means that more government regulation won’t cut it. the only truly reliable regulator aspiring oligarchs is free market competition – competition absent government meddling, which ensures that no one has an artificial advantage.
crap, the cops brought the paddywagon – see you at the station.
So the whole problem was caused by the Fed being too lax in regulating credit, and would all be resolved if we just didn’t let the government regulate anything.
Well, at least you’ve demonstrated very well what Taibbi here was saying about Zakaria’s reasonable-sounding right wing propaganda, by allowing people to contrast it with the entirely unreasonable, openly and obviously self-contradicting kind.
In response to another comment. See in context »Not obviously self-contradicting, my friend. Only apparently self-contradicting.
The oligarchs, you see, willed the Fed into being in the first place. The existence of a so-called ‘lender of last resort’ allows them the maneuvering room for all manner of profligacy. Capitalism requires no ‘regulation of credit’. This, too, is a common myth perpetrated upon us all.
[...] Fareed Zakaria’s Manifesto Matt Taibbi This is a beautiful piece of writing. Describing the misdeeds of Wall Street in the last decade by saying “few people acted… nobly” is sort of like saying that Stalin was “not always sociable” or O.J. Simpson was “not always committed to preserving life.” I mean, talk about a freaking understatement. Forgetting entirely the other insane lies in this passage (my favorite being the one about bureuacrats not taking cash for favors — I guess he means except for Bob Rubin taking $130 million or whatever from Citi after pushing through that merger), that “not so noble” bit is where Zakaria earns his money. [...]
Matt you are on the way to redefining gonzo journalism. Sorry, no movie deal without the drug problem. Just keep up the great work of telling the people how it really is.
[...] Taibbi “His description of the root causes of this financial crisis are about what you’d expect from a man who invoked The Great Gatsby to explain the mentality of the murderer of 4,000 people.” — Matt Taibbi, on Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria [...]
You’ll all have to help me with the links on this, but I recall after Buckley’s death Zakaria talked about the wonderful days spent as a grad student having a quick sail and dinner at Papa Buckley’s.
And all I could think is “jesus, does nobody get how totally co-opting this must have been?”
This sweet smart boy has been owned by the establishment and the nobility since he was 24. Why would anyone expect real journalism from him?
Good on you, Matt. Don’t slow down and don’t spare anyone.
[...] Taibbi has a strong response to Zakaria’s piece. 04 Jul 2009 | By V Anantha Nageswaran | Concerning UncategorizedTags: [...]
Amazing. My sentiments (on Zakaria) exactly, except actually formulated instead of just unghghghgh-ed through gritted teeth.
Thought experiment: which writer does the world more of an injustice by merely existing, Zakaria or Thomas Friedman?
Also, this makes me think of an old, old Harpers article I recently read: “Who goes Nazi” (http://www.harpers.org/archive/1941/08/0020122). The idea being, at any given cocktail party, you can pick out the people who, if they were alive in 1941, would “go Nazi”. I think Zakaria kind of personifies this… And, really, who doesn’t love an opportunity to bring up Nazis again?
[...] Taibbi has a great take down of Fareed Zakaria’s recent essay on capitalism. One has to wonder how Zakaria can be so [...]
funny stuff! i agree with about 99% of what you wrote here. this guy is definitely turning habanero sauce into breast milk. i would not our economic system capitalism, it’s more like gov’t sponsored larceny funded by thieves and regulated by larcenous thieves. we’ve been playing under the rules of democratic capitalism and the other set of rules? plutocratic fascism.
but i’m glad you’re highlighting the differences.
Very good analysis and I enjoy Fareed Zakaria’s show. I love the thought that Islam rejects the idea of western capitalism perhaps he will put Dubai as proof of this idea. A city built by underpaid and abused workers as a celebration of wealth. American Capitalism at its best. Then there’s that OPEC thing a thing of beauty that would send Sinclair spinning in his grave. And these are the guys financing the Wasabi Sect of Islam.
The thought that “Most of what happened over the past decade across the world was legal. Bankers did what they were allowed to do under the law” neglects to mention that most of what happened over the past decade used to be illegal.
What I find most disturbing in all of this apologia is no one questions the basic problem: Namely that a world wide economy that contains treaties that seem to negate national interests can be destructive to our welfare.
The question that I have proposed to all my libertarian and Rand believers is simple: Can a multinational corporation be patriotic?
Let me offer an example of our self interest suffering under international contract that no citizen ever voted for: Our national government accounts, astonishing, for 20% of all our spending. If we could direct this to a buy America program we could boost domestic industry and keep dollars in our country. Yet both Democrats and Republicans will not support this effort to put real Americans, in Wilson’s terms red blooded Americans to work on rebuilding our economy. What is wrong with this picture?
Every night is Guy Fawkes night with FZ at the Helm of CNN GPS or Newsweek. And every newsweek date of publication under his leadership is November 5th for this GPS man of new with GPS links of old.
CNN GPS or shall we say,
GPS : Gun Powder Society
He has managed to marry into Englands oldest celebrated lineage reaching back for 3 times trying to overthrow the queen.
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I see no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up the King and Parli’ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d (or by God’s mercy*)
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring. (Holla*)
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
And what should we do with him? Burn him!
FZ 360 is the most appalling Yellow Journalist ever to be TRANSPARENTLY in-placed into Newsweek with GunPowderTreasonous flair. Give it a fucking rest FZ. You are TOO Transparent.
Once upon a time covert societies used to be covert.
GPS
P
SPG
3 times b4 the Global Public Square (GPS)
has witnessed attempts at overthrows of governments.
Gunpowder Plot Society (GPS) is 1 of these 3.
3 Times have the oldest reigning family in England, the grand Throckmorton lineage,
of GPS own wife have attempted to overthrow the English rule and install puppet queens.
Now there is a 4th.
FZ, 800 year old wife family in hand, represents a minor role in this grand comedy unraveling page by page before our eyes in its as yet infancy. FZ alas is a Pawn with little intelligence as to the role he is playing. Rather unsuccessfully one might add. FZ as Matt has pointed out, is far too transparent.
GPS man of a new is GPS man of old.
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I see no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up the King and Parli’ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d (or by God’s mercy*)
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring. (Holla*)
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
And what should we do with him? Burn him!
[...] could to a better job of ripping that thing to shreds than Matt Taibbi himself. With his June 24 blog entry, he did just that: Zakaria works hard to tell the crisis story minus these outrageous details. [...]