William Greider - editor of Rolling Stone - Interview

Progressive, The, June, 1997 by Eyal Press

William Greider, the national editor of Rolling Stone magazine, is one of America's most provocative writers on economic and political affairs. Over the last two decades, he has persistently challenged the shibboleths of mainstream economic thinking. In 1989, Greider published the award-winning Secrets of the Temple, a lucid critique of the Federal Reserve System. Before that, while a reporter at The Washington Post, he broke the story of how David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's budget director, grew disillusioned with supply-side economics and the resulting budget deficits that burden the American political system today.

Greider's latest subject is the global economy. In One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, he travels from Mexico to China, Germany to Indonesia, visiting factories, and talking to business executives and workers alike. The deregulation and globalization of capitalism, he warns, is leading to mounting contradictions and inequalities.

I spoke with Greider in the Washington office of Rolling Stone.

Q: In your book, you question the idea that what's good for the big U.S. multinationals is good for America.

William Greider: My core disappointment with the Clinton Administration is exactly that. I think Clinton made a decision early on to make common cause with the Fortune 200-to follow their cues as to what the strategy should be. He probably sincerely believed that that's the only way he could go. But I would ask this question: Is Boeing really going to solve our economic problems? Is IBM? Is General Electric? This is heavy thunder for people, because I'm challenging an orthodoxy that's been in place for forty or fifty years. But if you continue with the old orthodoxy, you get facts like these: IBM in the past ten years has become a company with the majority of its employees overseas; Boeing is our national champion in commercial aircraft, and we want them to sell a lot of airplanes, but meanwhile in order to sell those airplanes they're shifting jobs to China, Indonesia, and elsewhere; General Electric is one of those companies that has horrendously shrunk its U.S. work force in the past few years.

Now I'd ask an agnostic political question: Why are we subsidizing these companies? I know what the theory says about how exports create jobs, but I look at the top fifteen exporters and that's not what's happening. They're all shrinking their US. employment. The government used to claim that $1 billion in exports will produce 20,000 jobs. At the beginning of the Clinton Administration, it was recalculated to 19,000. Now the Commerce Department has recalculated it again, and it's only 14,000. What's going on there? Those statistics, which are fallacious in any case because they don't net out the losses from imports, show that the public stake in the outcome is getting smaller and smaller. Let's go through the whole bloody federal government and ask the question: Who is really getting all of these subsidies, and are they creating jobs?

Q: Why do the politicians continue to follow the old orthodoxy -- is the problem campaign finance, or is it ideological?

Greider: Well, it's not just campaign finance. It's the thinktanks, it's the media. As a politician, you're putting a lot at risk to raise these kinds of questions. The AFL-CIO and others who care need to cultivate, literally to nurture, some progressive politicians who are willing to address these issues.

But what I'm getting at is not neatly divided into liberal or conservative. There's actually potential for a kind of left-right coalition. You have the free-market libertarian conservatives; they want to abolish all of this stuff anyway -- at least they say they do. Let's call them on that. Let's say: "OK, we've got a program here that we know is simply making the hogs fatter. It's not helping the folks -- we're willing to throw it in."

And I think liberals, progressives, leftists, whatever you want to call them, have some soul-searching to do on their own. A lot of them are stuck now on this big, gauzy question, "Is government good or is government bad?" and they're defending government. The truth is, government is what people use it for. Who's using it now? Is it serving the broad public interest or is it serving fairly narrow private interests? If you start asking questions like that, you find yourself standing side by side with some conservatives on some stuff, but I don't see anything wrong with that.

Q: How would you distinguish your argument from that of Pat Buchanan and other protectionists?

Greider: I wanted to stay away from Buchanan and Perot because it's pretty hard to know what they really want -- I mean, they throw a lot of stuff out. But the core of it is nationalist. There's a pretty widespread feeling in this country -- it's not just Buchanan -- that says the rest of the world is afflicting us, and if they will go away we can return to the glory days we used to enjoy. The burden of my book is to say, "Look, we're all in this together, we're connected, whether we like it or not. The single-minded protectionist impulse, which calls for protecting your home industries, can lead to an implosion of commerce, and I don't think it will work." What I'm trying to lead people to is a broader conception that isn't reactionary. The idea is that we're not going to throw people over the sides. Instead, we'll try to make it work on both ends.