NOTE: This post is by Tony Wikrent.
William H. Greider
(August 6, 1936 – December 25, 2019)
Just a few days after Paul Volcker and Felix Rohatyn finally relieved this planet of their mortal existence, William H. Greider passed on Christmas. There are, I suppose, some good things to be said about Volcker and Rohatyn, but I don’t know what they might be.
However, I do know a lot of good things to write about William Greider. Just a partial list of the books he wrote is enough to realize that a giant who walked among us may be no more, but the shadow he cast will linger for a long while.
Secrets of the Temple, How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country
(Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, 1987)
Who Will Tell the People?: The Betrayal of American Democracy
(Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 1992)
One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism
(Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 1997)
Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace
(PublicAffairs, 1998)
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
(Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 2003)
Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (And Redeeming Promise) Of Our Country.
(Rodale Books, 2009)
Greider was born in Cincinnati at a time when dominance of that city’s economy had shifted from meat packing and the Ohio River steamboat trade to industrial manufacturing. Most notably, the city had emerged as a center of machine tool making: R. K. Le Blond Machine Tool Co.; Lodge and Shipley Machine Tool Co.; G. A. Gray Co.; Cincinnati Shaper Co.; American Tool Works Co.; Cincinnati Planer Co.; Cincinnati Bickford Tool Co. and the company that was then the largest machine tool maker in America: Cincinnati Milling Machine Company, later named Cincinnati Milacron. And like other centers of machine tool production historically — the Connecticut River valley (called Precision Valley in the first half of the twentieth century), Philadelphia, and Chicago, the ethos of Veblen’s producer class ran strong and deep. I have no doubt that this producer class ethos helped shape Greider’s life in profound ways, fitting him for the unique and powerful role of a leading critic of de-industrialization and financialization. His study at Princeton University thankfully did not inflict him with trained incapacity.
His professional writing career began at The Washington Post. as a national correspondent, then assistant managing editor for national news for 15 years. In 1981, Greider wrote an essay for The Atlantic titled “The Education of David Stockman,” which was probably his writing with the most immediate impact. It caused a national uproar, and led to President Reagan dismissing Stockman as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. In one of several passages that illuminated the venality and hypocrisy of the Reagan administration, Stockman told Greider, “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers.” The article was soon expanded and published as a book by the same name.
In 1982, Greider jumped to Rolling Stone, eventually becoming national affairs editor, even while he challenged some of the most powerful political and economic institutions, such as the Federal Reserve, and the military-industrial complex. Here is a link to Greider’s articles at Rolling Stone.
His last stint as national affairs correspondent was with The Nation, beginning in 1999.
In this excerpt from his 1987 book, Secrets of the Temple, How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, Greider captures the central issue of political economy in our time. Remember that this was written 32 years ago.
The question of who owned financial wealth–or who did not–was the buried fault line of American politics. Wealth holders whose money circulated through Wall Street markets were an untypical minority of Americans, with distinctly different economic interests than the majority. The distribution of wealth was the subtext beneath nearly every important economic question that faced the government, yet it was seldom discussed in politics. Political leaders, instead, treated wealth like a taboo subject, cloaked in euphemisms, as if the hard facts of who owned capital might excite class jealousies they could not satisfy or raise questions about the system for which they had no answers.
Nevertheless, the concentration of wealth was the fulcrum on which the most basic political questions pivoted, a dividing line deeper than region or religion, race or sex. In the nature of things, government might choose to enhance the economic prospects of the many or to safeguard the accumulated wealth held by the few, but frequently the two purposes were in irreconcilable conflict. The continuing political struggle across this line, though unseen and rarely mentioned, was the central narrative of American political history, especially in the politics of money. (pp. 37-38)
The collapse of monetarism as a practical theory involved more than the embarrassment of selected economists. Volcker and the Federal Reserve had embraced the money aggregates too and allowed M-1 to guide their policy decisions. The bankers and financial professionals had bought into the same belief, an alluring faith that offered a simple answer to bewildering complexities. Regulating a single economic variable, the money supply, could somehow produce order in all the others. (pp. 685)
Catastrophe was general in Iowa. Thousands of farmers faced liquidation on old debts or their banks refused to grant new credit for the approaching growing season. The value of Iowa farmland was decreased by half and small towns withered as the local commerce disappeared. Iowa lost fifty thousand of its citizens. The price of corn, which had been above $3.50 only a few years earlier, fell steadily, headed toward a ruinous low–corn at $1 a bushel….
On a farm near Unionville, Iowa, a group of distressed farmers gathered in the living room of Clifford and Evelyne Burger to exchange tips on fending off the bank foreclosures, to console one another and to search for answers. The Burgers had been missing debt payments sporadically since 1983; the local bank had just turned down their loan application for spring planting, the money to buy seed and fill their fuel tank for the ’85 crop. The Burgers and their friends thought they had found the explanation. Their failure, they decided, was caused by a remote conspiracy of bankers, operating through the Federal Reserve.
“First, the Powers pump up inflation, then they start the propaganda that we have to reduce inflation,” Jim Phillips, a grain farmer from Centerville, explained.”They established this policy for the personal gain of the Federal Reserve and the bankers that control it….
Mrs. Burger distributed an illustrated pamphlet entitled “Billions for Bankers, Debt for People,” a polemical tract on the money question that was circulating widely in Iowa and the other afflicted farm states. The Federal Reserve, the pamphlet explained, was “a system of Banker-owned Mammon that usurped the mantle of government, disguised itself as our legitimate government, and set about to pauperize and control our people.
The farmers talked quite familiarly about this conspiracy against them, reciting old names and obscure events from the Federal Reserve’s early history. A web of international bankers had designed the central bank back in 1913 in order to dominate the world; their unseen control extended to grain companies, major conglomerates, the financial markets and the news media. These manipulations, the farmers earnestly explained, were guided by the “Power 300” and the “Inner Circle” and, ultimately, by the “Zionist Jewish conspiracy.”
….Like others, John Sellers was trying to combat the personal depression that accompanied economic failure. “It’s a very gray world and you feel like you’re ninety years old,: he said. “You’re in quicksand and there’s no way out. People take to bed and sleep and sleep and sleep. Many blame themselves. (pp. 668-669)
Note how Greider anticipated the infection of the body politic with the affliction of conspiracy theories.
At the end of 1989, Greider joined with Lawrence Goodwyn — the unsurpassed historian of the 19th century populists, and 20th century revolutions in Central Europe, who was also a tireless progressive activist — to give a presentation in St. Louis commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Populist Sub-Treasury Plan for financial reform. Here are some of Greider’s remarks from that presentation, Democratic Money: A Populist Perspective. Note its title.
It is perfectly plausible for the financial system of this country to put money into people’s hands, to make credit available for ordinary Americans at rates they can afford. The economy could be managed prosperously and equitably, serving all groups — not perfectly, but with some sense of justice that we would all recognize.
There is no physical reason in economics why that can’t happen. There are huge, intimidating political reasons why it did not happen in our history. In fact, at the very center of our politics is this subject, called “money and the regulation of credit, that we have been told we can’t talk about.
Again, Greider was years ahead of his time. In January 2019, the History Department at Harvard University joined with Harvard Law School to host a two-day conference on Money as a Democratic Medium, explicitly exploring money as a political creation, and considering how to bring the creation and distribution of money under more democratic control. There are well over a dozen presentations available to watch on YouTube, but the one I most highly recommend is that by Mehrsa Baradaran of the University of Georgia Law School, and author of the seminal work The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Harvard University Press, 2019). Here is a link to Baradaran’s presentation.
In a pair of tweets, John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation, called Greider
a friend and comrade and occasional co-conspirator… “He taught me so see politics not as a game but high-stakes struggle for power in which the Democrats, sadly, yielded far too much ground to an increasingly right-wing Republican Party….
Born in the year of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s greatest electoral triumph, William Greider was in many senses the last New Dealer. His death, at age 83, represents a stark loss for American journalism. And for those of us who knew his great generosity of spirit and intellect.”
Another colleague tweeted:
In One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (1997), Greider exposed the fraud of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the whole paradigm of “free trade,” a paradigm almost all mainstream economists still cling to fiercely and unquestioningly. One World, Ready or Not evoked only scorn and ridicule from most mainstream economists, including Paul Krugman, who was an apostle of free trade at the time. But it is Greider’s predictions of accelerating deindustrialization and outsourcing, and the destruction of the working class, that have proven to be more accurate than anything offered by pro-NAFTA economists.
Here are some of the articles inspired by Greider, Jon :Larson and I have posted at Real Economics:
May 25, 2010
The austerity ghouls in USA
After giving the public’s spare change to the crooked banksters, it was inevitable that someone would come to the “brilliant” conclusion that this should be paid for by raiding Social Security. 3,2,1…
Whacking the Old Folks
By William Greider / The Nation
August 9, 2010
Did anyone mention deflation?
This is the latest from William Greider who quite literally wrote the book on the operation of the Federal Reserve.
Deflation, Not Deficit, Is the Real Threat
By William Greider / The Nation
Greider on “free” trade
Krugman the free trader
Greider on Summers—the definitive word
Greider on Yellen
Greider on Krugman and free trade
Greider on the “populism” of Sanders and Trump
Greider on how Trump could beat Clinton
William Greider: Is Hillary Ready for Us?
The trouble is, the [Clintonite] New Dems are now the Old Guard. Their center-right program—financial deregulation and “free market” globalization—has not only run out of gas but is rightly blamed for laying the groundwork for financial catastrophe. Yet the New Dem wing still holds the high ground, with big money and loyal supporters as well as Clinton clones populating the key governing positions. The labor-liberal insurgency has a weak bench because for a generation its promising young people were excluded from governing ranks—systematically screened out by both Clinton and Obama administrations—if they showed telltale signs of leaning leftward or embracing non-conformist ideas that resonate with the party’s New Deal values. By contrast, Republican regimes since Ronald Reagan have always made a point of appointing thousands of young right-wingers to second-level government posts as the training ground for long-term governance. Dems still invoke sentimental rhetoric from the New Deal era, but the practical reality is that the party’s economic policy makers went to school on Wall Street, either before or after their public service (sometimes both).
And, finally, what William Neil reminded me was one of Greider’s best essays, “The End of New Deal Liberalism” which appeared in The Nation, January 5, 2011, and has been reposted by Physicians for a National Health Program as William Greider’s message for us. Perhaps it is as fitting as it is disconcerting to end a memorial to William Greider, with what threatens to become William Greider’s memorial to the experiment of American republican democracy.
We have reached a pivotal moment in government and politics, and it feels like the last, groaning spasms of New Deal liberalism. When the party of activist government, faced with an epic crisis, will not use government’s extensive powers to reverse the economic disorders and heal deepening social deterioration, then it must be the end of the line for the governing ideology inherited from Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson.
Political events of the past two years have delivered a more profound and devastating message: American democracy has been conclusively conquered by American capitalism. Government has been disabled or captured by the formidable powers of private enterprise and concentrated wealth. Self-governing rights that representative democracy conferred on citizens are now usurped by the overbearing demands of corporate and financial interests. Collectively, the corporate sector has its arms around both political parties, the financing of political careers, the production of the policy agendas and propaganda of influential think tanks, and control of most major media.
What the capitalist system wants is more—more wealth, more freedom to do whatever it wishes. This has always been its instinct, unless government intervened to stop it. The objective now is to destroy any remaining forms of government interference…
The power shift did not start with Obama, but his tenure confirms and completes it. The corporates began their systematic drive to dismantle liberal governance back in the 1970s, and the Democratic Party was soon trying to appease them, its retreat whipped along by Ronald Reagan’s popular appeal and top-down tax cutting. So long as Democrats were out of power, they could continue to stand up for liberal objectives and assail the destructive behavior of business and finance (though their rhetoric was more consistent than their voting record). Once back in control of government, they lowered their voices and sued for peace. Beholden to corporate America for campaign contributions, the Democrats cut deals with banks and businesses and usually gave them what they demanded, so corporate interests would not veto progressive legislation.
Obama has been distinctively candid about this. He admires the “savvy businessmen” atop the pinnacle of corporate power. He seeks “partnership” with them. The old economic conflicts, like labor versus capital, are regarded as passé by the “new Democrats” now governing. The business of America is business. Government should act as steward and servant, not master.
William Greider on the “Democrats’ Money Dilemma”
YouTube Feb 10, 2009
bruce wilder
Thanks for this extensive post, with the many citations and quotations. He truly was a giant.
sidd
Greider was a great man, thanx for the writeup.
Small typo, i think it should be “Cincinnati Milacron.” I used several of their products and Leblond and some of the others.
sidd
Hugh
Free trade is free as long as you are not the one paying for it with your job, your house, maybe your life.
Free markets are also free, or nearly so, as long as the Fed is willing to make $120 billion a DAY in short term low interest loans available to keep markets juiced. Our ruling class even the anti-Trumpers go on and on about how good the economy is. Thing is 2019 will probably be about as bad for jobs as 2016 which was a bad job year for job creation, and even what jobs are created fall into the crap category. Meanwhile the very modest gains in real wages are just that and are based on a CPI that does not seem to correlate with the price increases/inflation ordinary people experience in their lives. Oh, and give me $120 billion a day to play with and another $60 billion a month in T-bill buybacks and I, you, or even an untrained monkey can send stock markets to record highs.
So many economists and political scientists don’t really understand the concepts or the realities behind them and are grossly incapable to work among these ideas. What is clear from just the excerpts given is that Greider could. I am not sure if he was prescient or that the mainstream simply beats dead horses for decades after they are stone cold dead. They remind me of the pet shop owner in the Monty Python “Dead Parrot” skit to whom the exasperated customer (the Greiders of this world) reply,
” ‘E’s not pinin’! ‘E’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!”
Herman
@Hugh,
From the post it seems that Greider grew up in an era when America still had an economy that sometimes functioned in ways that benefitted ordinary people. Today there are very few good jobs left and as you point out, the figures that the media presents about the economy do not show how bad things are. Most jobs created since 1990 have been low-wage, low-hour jobs.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/american-jobs-are-getting-worse-according-to-a-new-economic-measure/
People of Greider’s generation could remember a very different economy and as they pass away I am afraid that this information will go down the memory hole as people will forget that in some ways conditions used to be better for many people. Instead we will get more Panglossian pap about how we are living in the best times ever.
450.org
Greider definitely had great insight but his message was always one of redemption. “If they would just see the error of their ways, the ship could be righted.” The problem is the ship, right or wrong. We shouldn’t be on it in the first place.
The Nation, to me at least, is a limited hang intended as “Leftist” neutralization and containment. It’s what the establishment wants to pass off as “Left.” It is not truly “Left” by any means. I used to read it long ago until I figured out the pattern and the strategy. It was intended to throw your wondering and wandering disillusioned self back into the hands of the corporate-controlled Democratic party. I consequently canceled my subscription and my propaganda detector has been effectively tuned since.
450.org
This book proves my point. Redemption is even in the title.
https://www.amazon.com/Come-Home-America-Redeeming-Promise/dp/1594868166
This Amazon review hits the nail on the head.
<blockquote<I give this book 4 stars for setting the record straight in fairly unambiguous terms. This story needs to be told and understood. As far as Greider's prescription for putting this country back on its axis . . . dreamland. This is the stuff that might be useful in getting a progressive leader elected or perhaps effecting some social change, but given the philosophical divide that currently separates regular Americans from one another, lacks the basic connective tissue for real substantive change.
It seems to me that there are really two books here, "The Rise and Fall of our Country" a well documented and succinct document of the way things are and "The Redeeming Promise of America" a hopeful treatise about how things might be . . . if only they were different. The first book details the long standing collusion between monied interests (multinational Corporations and Wall Street firms) and National politics (The two major parties)and how they have conspired for greed and power against the greater National good. This unholy alliance has substantially weakened our democracy and literally threatens to destroy America under an avalanche of debt and indebtedness to foreign interests. The pursuit of oil by Corporate behemoths has led this country down a path of constant global conflict which other behemoths are more than happy to exploit by supplying the hardware and related "services" to accommodate this "necessary" expansion of military power. Criticism has been effectively stymied by the unholy alliance as unpatriotic even as all the evidence leads to the opposite conclusion. Eisenhower's warning of the Military Industrial Complex has come to fruition and Greider's documentation and analysis of this reality is downright frightening (Unfortunately men of Eisenhower's caliber are almost completely absent from the National politics of today.) Greider writes well about the sobering realities of the road back to sustainability and equity but then gets drunk with Obamaesque zeal when he starts cheer-leading about how everyday Americans need to band together and take back the reigns of our National destiny to the promised land. His premature death knoll of the Republican machine shows his optimism to be delusional. The Republicans (I refuse to confuse them with Conservatives because they have decimated traditional values of Capitalism)have somehow managed a comeback, not by changing course, but by more of the same "free market"(not as classically defined but as exercised in America today) nonsense that Grieder so effectively destroys. The only way I see out of the current predicament at this stage is a "real" revolution but the slow and steady erosion of the "American Way" has been relatively painless up to this point (thanks to massive borrowing from China and other Nations). Americans by in large have become arrogant, ignorant and lazy, a combination that makes them slow to change, easily manipulated and unlikely to revolt. Greider seems to have taken a page right out of the Obama "how to get elected" playbook, where the candidate used his experience as a community organizer to connect people together and to implant the seeds of change into the American consciousness, as the thesis for his second book "The redeeming Promise of America". While Obama did get elected, the action implicit in his seeds of change rhetoric was not forthcoming. Perhaps the risky prospect of immediate and real pain and the potential of confronting the Military Industrial Complex head-on brought his lofty words back to earth. It now seems that the greatest opportunity for change in my lifetime ended with a whimper and not a bang.
Reality: Just two years after the publishing of this book the rape of the taxpayer by the wealthy and powerful remains unprosecuted. The Republican elite continue to satiate their minions with anti-elite rhetoric. The largest military in the history of the world continues to control the debate unabated. The transfer of Presidential power alas has nothing to do with the transfer of real power and the strong willed American has been reduced to a farm animal with an overdrawn credit card, upside down mortgage and an unqualified level of high self esteem. The survey of the current American landscape does not fill one with optimism toward the future.
Tony Wikrent
sidd – Thanks for the correction!
I hope at some point you will write more about your career in or around the machine tool industry.
I think Jon Larson is one of the few writers who has a solid grasp of the importance of tools – based on his knowledge of Thorstein Veblen. You might want to read Chapter 8 “Tools” of his book, Elegant Technology, available at this link for free:
http://elegant-technology.com/resource/PRINT_ET.PDF
450.org
Greider’s defense of Stockman was so sweet and considerate, wasn’t it? I have nothing for spit for Stockman.
https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/09/the_education_o.html
Willy
I watched Morning Joe for a brief spell today. The topics I saw were:
Immigration (actually, the ‘evil’ of deporting illegal aliens)
Brilliant Minds (a global neoliberal tech outfit if I’ve ever seen one)
Ringo Starr’s life (Wasn’t he a drummer? I missed the part where he’s now a major historic figure with “Octopus Garden” being a classic.)
I searched to find if the passing of William Greider, occasional MSNBC panelist, had ever even been mentioned on that show. AFAIK, nope. I had enough and vowed never to click onto Morning Joke for any reason outside of cursory curiosity ever again.
Senator-Elect
Thank you for this. I need to read his books.
See also Dean Baker’s article remembering Greider: http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/bill-greider-and-secular-stagnation
Another case of economists living in a dream world while observers of the real world get it right.
nihil obstet
I encountered William Greider when he wrote for Rolling Stone, and he became the reason I kept my subscription. He made me interested in economics and taught me to consider the economic realities behind government action and policies. And you’re right that his concern for people shone through his work.
Hugh
Dean Baker writes, “[economists] ridiculed the idea that trade deficits could lead to unemployment, after all, the Fed could just lower interest rates to make up any shortfall in demand.”
Ross Perot talked about the great sucking sound of jobs lost to NAFTA. And free trade is one aspect of trade deficits. Not like we are running trade surpluses with China either, for example. Also interest rates are just a convenient fiction. What the PTB really do is let the Sacklers pump billions of dollars of oxycontin to the un and under employed. They off themselves. Problem solved. Replace with illegals as needed.