Here is a guest post from Bill Neil based on a long essay posted on Campaign for America's Future:

"It seems like everyone spends a considerable amount of time on Wall Street “watching their backs,” because the place is ripe with job and bonus anxiety – and insecurity. That’s part of the fascinating story told by anthropologist Karen Ho in her book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (2009). Don’t let the terminology in the title put you off: ethnography is just the term for the summary that comes out of “the fieldwork.” This is one I stumbled across, and I wasn’t sure how it would go after I finished the 38 page Introduction entitled, appropriately, “Anthropology Goes to Wall Street.” But Ms. Ho, a Stanford and Princeton grad who worked at Bankers Trust in 1996-1997 and did her field work from 1996-1999 after she got “liquidated” herself, really won me over; I couldn’t put the book down. At first it was a battle between her upfront stance – the first sentence of the Acknowledgment reads “An intellectual commitment to social and economic justice first galvanized this book’s journey”- and the awkward terminology (some borrowed from the English Department narrative wars of the 1990’s?). That’s where “privilege” becomes a verb and we learn about the Wall Street Habitus (“‘a system of dispositions’”) and she goes about “decentering privileged models” - but that was about it. I found the few really alien terms quickly explained themselves from the context. And what a context it is, the missing one from the “other side of the world” – that the angry anti-government protesters from this August never mentioned.

Ho first caught the Wall Street itch in September of 1995 when she read about the break-up of AT&T which led to “77,800 managers receiving ‘buy-out offers’” and the down-sizing of 48,500 workers – which coincided with its stock going up by 10.6% of its total value. She reminds us that those golden 1990’s from the Clinton years were full of employment churning and poor tradeoffs: lots of Starbucks and Wal-Mart’s and IPOs (Initial Public Stock Offerings) and dot.com profitless wonder jobs created, but also incredible corporate downsizings: according to one outplacement firm: 1994 - 516,000; 1995 - 440,000; 1996 - 447,000; 1997 - 434,000…another source says downsizing averaged 3 million people per year. Readers who lived through the era may recall, that quite often, the bigger the downsizings, the more Wall Street cheered, and the more the stock rose.

(And Floyd Norris of the New York Times tells us we haven’t shaken the bad habit: “For the first time since the Depression, the American economy has added virtually no jobs in the private sector over a 10-year period.” That’s from July 1999 to July, 2009. Now wasn’t one of the charges to the Federal Reserve, from the Humphrey-Hawkins legislation, to tend to the nation’s employment needs, as well as to control inflation? I don’t recall this article being waved around at those government-castigating hearings. )

I like the way Ho went about her work, a field study of the “new exotic,” the resurrection of Wall Street and its practices which would become the “epitome” and the guidance for “a sea change occurring in American business practices during the past three decades…” - a new type of capitalism. As I thought about her work, and that anthropological approach, and the fantastic universe of exotic derivatives which have led the US and indeed, most of the financial world, nearly over the cliff and into the sea, I couldn’t help but summoning up images of those mysterious moai, the giant stone heads of Easter Island, averaging 13 feet and 14 tons in size, most facing out to sea, forever haunting that desolate and isolated 63 square mile island in the Pacific Ocean. The collapse of the ecology of the island, and its civilization, and how its leaders persuaded its people to invest so much of their wealth and energy in sculpting and hauling 887 of these giant statues, has left archeologists, anthropologists and engineers scratching their heads. Those leaders must have had some mystique about them, and some persuasive powers. A mystique surely as powerful as that which has surrounded that abstraction called “The Market” over the past 30 years, and the high priests on Wall Street which interpreted it for us.

Now we don’t know whether the Easter Island leaders led their people, lemming like, over the cliff and into the sea after their exhausting labors, but for those readers who think I am being unfair with this analogy, I ask your forbearance for a moment while I recollect for you a barometer of Market fever I had almost entirely forgotten: retired Admiral John Poindexter’s proposal to blend the magic of the market to the contemporary (summer of 2003) worries about future 9/11’s, by creating a futures market in terrorism, which was institutionally sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I defer here to the description provided by Steve Fraser in his wonderful book, Every Man A Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (2005), that the idea was a “coming together of free-market utopianism and imperial hubris.” Here is more from Fraser’s peerless rendering of our own little excursion to an Easter Island dreamscape:

People would be invited to speculate on the likelihood of death and destruction around the globe. In its original incarnation, it was to be open to the first thousand members of the public who applied to participate. This Populist version of el casino macabre was soon modified so that only insiders, recognized ‘experts’ from government, business, and academia, would be allowed to place their bets on what mayhem seemed most likely and where…Business Week found the notion… ‘intriguing.’ Almost no one else did…Congressmen were appalled, and the Pentagon did a quick about-face…Belief in the market as the supreme conveyer of the truth had gone so far that an idea like this one could wend its way through the bureaucracy of a central government institution without anyone bothering to challenge its moral insanity. Coming as it did on the heels of the most gargantuan financial frauds ever witnessed on the Street, it is an even more remarkable happening. No one worried about the possibility of ‘insider trading’ or, even more frightening, of schemes to foment terrorism where none had existed before precisely to reap a speculative windfall…(Pages 573-575.)

So that’s some terrain here - the power of The Market and the siren call of the Street - to sink one’s anthropologic teeth into. Karen Ho’s gift is to ground grand abstractions in the actual practices of Wall Street and to examine carefully its own representations about hiring the brightest from the best schools, working harder and more hours than anyone else, paying the royal bonuses, and justifying it all under the all-forgiving shareholder value halo, an idea which has driven out more balanced, long term – and, dare we say, more humane values – that corporate management formerly took into consideration back in the mid-1960’s: such as impacts on workers, communities, consumers, the long term good of the firm, even of the nation itself - perish the thought."

- Bill Neil

Rockville, MD 20851

PS Readers can get on my Email list for future postings, about one a month or so...shoot me an email at w.neil@att.net

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