Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 842

March 8, 2016

Hillary’s cronyism is showing: A closer look at her economic proposals reveals a neoliberal agenda

Billed as a major populist economic address, Hillary Clinton recently put forth her jobs program in Michigan. Wall Street is smiling. Her program fits perfectly within the neoliberal framework as she focuses on how to use public funds and policies to promote private sector gain. There are tax incentives to urge large and small corporations to create more jobs in the U.S. There are tax breaks to encourage corporations to provide more training and profit sharing plans. And there are tax breaks to promote long term investment instead of short-term gains. To balance this equation, she also calls for exit taxes if companies take tax breaks and then move out of the country. Her mantra is clear: if you do right to the American people, we'll do right by you. Along the way, she waxes euphoric about the buoyancy of the private sector: "New businesses are opening. Families are moving in. The streetlights are on again. The buses and running again. There is a palpable feeling of pride and community and we have to spread economic revitalization to all of Detroit's neighborhoods." (See here for full speech.) Not a word is mentioned about public goods or public sector jobs. Clearly, the only real job is a private sector job. Hillary Sends a Signal to Wall Street At the same time, she uses a dog whistle to let Wall Street know that she won't be coming down hard on them: “I’m not interested in condemning whole categories of businesses or the entire private sector” Furthermore, she dances around the perils of free-trade deals by putting the entire blame on China, and therefore not on the Clinton and Obama administrations who were/are gung-ho free traders.. Her silence about NAFTA, however, is deafening. And that's very good news to corporate and financial elites because NAFTA is the trade deal that has facilitated the financial strip-mining of the American worker. It has placed U.S. workers into direct daily competition with much less expensive labor south of the boarder. In fact, Hillary argues all such debates are now ancient history. It's unproductive, she claims, to be "re-fighting battles from 20 years ago...." But those battles are not over for Michigan workers who feel the incessant pressure from NAFTA on job security and the downward pressure on incomes and benefits. Hillary can't rebuild the middle-class, even on her own free-market terms, without undoing large parts of NAFTA. Fearing to take on Financial Strip-mining Throughout her glowing tribute to the private sector, she also duly notes that corporations and financiers care too much about short-term stock prices instead of the long-term health of the company. She is correct to say that they are spending 80 to 90 percent of all corporate revenues on stock buybacks and dividends: “That’s money they’re not using to train their workers or give them a raise,” And then there are the usual tropes about the "casino culture on Wall Street" and the ever faithful applause line: "We need to make sure Wall Street never wrecks Main Street again." Amen to all that. But the whip she hope to crack is more like a wet noodle. She wants to reward corporations and investors with tax incentives to encourage long-term investment, worker training and profit sharing with employees. But, she remains stone cold silent on two real power moves that could actually change elite Wall Street and corporate behavior. She does not talk about outlawing stock buybacks. And she does not mention the financial speculation tax. It is relatively easy for a president to stop stock buybacks. All it takes is a rule change at the SEC. Until 1982, it was considered stock manipulation for a company to boost its price by buying back its own shares en mass. Reagan's SEC appointee then legalized it. But making stock buybacks illegal again would be fiercely opposed by the very Wall Street executives and CEOs who are filling her campaign coffers. In fact, the system of runaway inequality is built upon those buybacks Today, the goal of virtually every large corporation is to use all of its cash-flow to buy back its own shares to enrich its CEOs and largest Wall Street investors. (Please see "It's Shameless Financial Strip-mining" and Profits Without Prosperity) The corruption of Stock Buybacks at GM While noting that the "auto industry just had its best year ever," Hillary ignores the outrageous case of financial strip-mining at GM. She couldn't mention it because it would also show the revolving door between the Obama administration and Wall Street. Harry Wilson, the Obama administrator who helped to negotiate the GM bailout, then left for a hedge fund job. The 43 year-old Wilson and his investors proceeded buy up 34 million GM shares. Why not? By then he was a GM expert, trained at taxpayer expense. He then demanded that GM use its cash reserves to buy back its own shares to make he and his investors tens of millions of dollars....for doing nothing at all. Think about the perversity of this ask. The American people bailed out GM to save hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the Midwest. Many of us hoped that once GM returned to financial health, it would use its reserves to build the best environmentally sound cars in the world, thereby helping retain U.S. jobs and help our planet survive. Instead, Wilson pressures GM to use its precious cash reserves to buyback its own shares in order to put money into his deep pockets and the pockets of his investors. Increase GM wages? Increase training? Increase R&D. No way. His wish was GM's command. On January 13, GM announced a $9 billion stock buyback plan. But Hillary couldn't talk about any of this. Because if she did, she would be forced to admit that her fairytale version of capitalism will never work as long as Wall Street dominates the economy. Carefully Ignoring Public Sector Jobs Team Hillary's populist sounding plan is in harmony with the most pernicious neo-liberal principle -- that the private sector, by definition, is more valuable than the public sector -- that all must be done to "encourage" private sector jobs while limiting public sector jobs. Hillary makes no mention at all at the decades-old attack on public sector jobs and benefits. Not a word about the privatization that is wrecking Michigan's public sector. Not a word about the need for increases in public sector jobs to bring safe water to the people of Flint. Instead she just blames the Republicans. When she discusses how to revitalize communities of color left behind, her only way of doing so is through private sector investment. But the public sector is the best path towards the middle class incomes for low-income Americans especially African-Americans. (See "Public Sector Jobs Vanish Hitting Blacks Hard"). She can't bring decent jobs and incomes to low-income communities without an expansion of the public sector. But why the knock on public sector jobs? Because Wall Street and the super-rich would have to pay for those jobs. To have a robust public sector that would get the lead out of inner-city pipes, fix up dilapidated schools, increase the number of teachers, and provide free higher education for all requires the expansion of the public sector. To maintain a decent society requires an increase in public goods and the hiring of more pubic workers. But doing so, leads us directly to a financial speculation tax on Wall Street as well as the end of off-shore tax havens for the super-rich -- neither of which are mentioned in her economic plan. Instead Team Hillary wants to sound tough on corporate bad actors, while providing tax breaks to most of the private sector. She wants to reign in Wall Street's risky behavior, without damaging it's financial strip-mining operation. And she wants to let market miraculously create better paying jobs for people of color, while remaining silent on the public sector and 20-year old trade deals. Being Hillary must be exhausting.

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Published on March 07, 2016 14:37

March 6, 2016

Script to Screen

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Published on March 06, 2016 21:40

The Democrats are about to blow it: This election is about new millennials, not aging baby boomers

“This campaign is about a political revolution,” Bernie Sanders says on the campaign trail, “to not only elect the president, but to transform this country.” Hillary Clinton replies that that’s a pipe dream and points to how hard it is to make even incremental progress against an intransigent Republican Congress. But while Clinton has good reasons for this rejoinder, she may be misreading the political landscape, and would do better politically by stealing Bernie Sanders’ ideas. Both numbers and recent history show that if the next president paints a big enough vision on the campaign trail, he or she could become as influential as Ronald Reagan. Here’s how. The politics of selfishness In 1978, Stanford Research Institute was charting the effect that the baby boomers were having on American society. Businesses were struggling to market to a generation that cared less about status and more about personal expression. This was the Me Decade, obsessed with human potential and self-actualization, and in California, Ronald Reagan was watching this change firsthand. Arnold Mitchell and his colleagues at SRI hit on a new market research method to get a handle on what was going on, which they called VALS, for Values and LifeStyle. Instead of using traditional demographics, they targeted people psychographically, based in significant part on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which put self-actualization at the pinnacle of human experience. The research found something stunning: There was a large and growing group that hadn’t been understood before, which they called the Inner Directeds. These people cut across traditional demographic lines, and what they had in common was their desire to live life on their own terms. Reagan took advantage of this group in the 1980 election. Boomers hated government and had railed against it since the Vietnam War. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” Reagan told them, “government is the problem.” You shouldn’t have to conform to government mandates, you should be free. Instead, Reagan put business at the center of American culture. It was business, he argued, that could best fulfill the needs of the individual, efficiently, cheaply, and with great abundance and variety, helping them to express themselves and their uniqueness. The consumer was king. Boomers responded by voting for Reagan in huge numbers, in both the 18-26 and 27-38 age brackets. The sudden loss of young voters rocked the Democratic party to its core. In 1992, Bill Clinton was the first candidate to use massive focus group testing to assess boomer attitudes, and to make a values sell based on individual fulfillment, instead of the old-style democratic politics of appealing to voters’ common interests. Government was a service to the individual, like business. Voters were passive consumers of politics, instead of active participants in it. Clinton crafted his message to fit exactly what the focus groups said suburban swing voters wanted, and promised tax cuts. “Government is in the way,” he told the Democratic National Convention. “It’s taking more of your money and giving you less in return.” But once in office, Clinton found the deficit was much larger than expected and he’d have to make deep cuts to social programs, so he dropped the tax cut proposal. This angered the inner-directed, anti-government suburban boomers Clinton had used to build a coalition in the campaign. When he proposed what became Hillarycare in 1993—which was about shared interests—they revolted. Disunited Democrats threw up several competing proposals, effectively killing it, and in 1994 voters turned Congress red, throwing Clinton’s presidency into jeopardy. To win reelection against this intense Republican surge, Clinton turned to values and lifestyle targeting data similar to that developed by SRI. “The era of big government is over,” he told voters in his 1996 State of the Union address. He hired Dick Morris and Mark Penn, who overlaid lifestyle data on swing voters to figure out how to identify and message to them on a granular level that reinforced his affinity with them. It was like rock climbing: one piton stake at a time. Under Morris and Penn’s direction, Clinton crafted his message, his public appearances and his policies to what the data suggested, to build a new psychological coalition that cut across ideological and demographic boundaries, and it worked. He won reelection, but he needed a sacrifice. He chose to end Roosevelt’s welfare program, exchanging it for a more Republican “welfare to work” plan, proving that “the era of big government” was indeed over. The president, and the party he led, had learned how to win in an era of self-obsession. They had won the battle but lost the philosophical war. By targeting the self-interest of voters, the Democratic Party became captive to a consumer approach to marketing politics that was playing within the Republicans’ framing. Considering the selfish focus of boomer culture, it may be that this strategy was necessary, as was the constant polling on policy measures during the second Clinton term, and Clinton and Morris would no doubt argue this. But as long as the president and the Democratic Party operated within such reactive political framing, with no appeal to imagination or a larger vision than self-interest, it would also move the country further and further away from the common interest values that the political left stood for. It was also based on an unexamined assumption: that self-interest is indeed the paramount political frame, instead of simply being one of many possible frames. The resulting focus on self-fulfillment at the expense of shared interests radically transformed government and American political and economic thought in the decades since. It’s a different economy, stupid We now know from science that self-fulfillment is not the only frame; in fact it is something of a mirage. Once basic needs are met, at a financial level of around $76,000, more money doesn’t make people happier. Like a carrot on a stick, one can chase self-fulfillment forever and still find it’s not quite within reach. Building a politics on this mirage drives the country ever rightward. When combined with international trade agreements designed to give individuals cheaper goods (which polls well on a granular level) and the attendant rise of globalization ushered in by Clinton, the pursuit of this mirage led to unprecedented corporate power, destruction of the middle class, and environmental disasters that are providing the fuel for Bernie Sanders’ campaign and his call for a political revolution. This is a philosophical struggle for the hearts and minds of the Democratic Party. Considering Bill Clinton’s campaign’s strategic approach and what seems to have become an underlying philosophy, one can begin to understand the challenges Hillary Clinton is facing now that the landscape is changing. After a career in the political cross hairs, focus-testing messages against self-obsessed individuals with short-term horizons in order to eke out small gains from an intransigent opposition, Sanders’ talk of a political revolution must seem laughably naive. But one can also see why this approach, and the underlying assumptions of the market-driven self-gratifying, short-term consumer culture that inform it, is posing major challenges to the old Clinton paradigm, and why Hillary needs a new approach if she is to truly seize the potential that is there in the electorate. Because it’s a different economy, stupid, something Sanders seems to recognize more intuitively than Clinton. As during the rise of Reagan, there is a huge, generational demographic shift underway, and it is also a psychographic one. The oldest boomers were 34 in 1980. The oldest millennials are 39 in 2016. While boomers have been self-absorbed and anti-government since the '60s, their children are growing up in a world where it is corporate power that is run amok, it is corporate power that has become corrupt, it is corporate power that is limiting their possibilities, and it is corporate power and the attendant income, infrastructure and environmental inequality, and its government enablers, that are the new political battlegrounds. A new, powerful coalition Mounting evidence shows that because of millennials’ ties through social media, younger voters do not think of themselves in the same radically self-obsessed, anti-government and entitled consumer ways their boomer parents did. Instead, they tend to see themselves as empowered but also a part of a collective, a social fabric, individual but cooperative, and because of this they value tolerance and equality. Most boomers were anxious to establish their independence; the data show millennials are not. Already the 20-44 population demographic is 8 percent larger than the 45-69 demo, it is significantly less self-focused, it sees the problems differently, indeed the problems are different, and reactive, self-focused politics are no longer necessarily the best way forward. And that means there is, lying there, waiting to be fully awakened, a new, powerful coalition that can reshape American politics by focusing on the common good, while respecting the rights of the individual. Not an either/or, a both/and. A new holistic politics where our shared interests unite us together. This is Clinton’s biggest danger and biggest opportunity: that she stands on the cusp and may not fully embrace its changing values, and so let the opportunity slip by. Looking back at the video footage of 25 years ago, one can see see a beautiful, brilliant, driven Hillary Clinton, fighting to eke out even gains in a culture of economic, political, psychological and social selfishness with a strong Republican current flowing against her. And yet she had the idealism to make that fight then. But Clinton may forever be a woman out of step with her time: once too idealistic and now too strategic. Consider the messaging of Texas congressman Chris Bell, who told the Dallas Morning News that:

“I completely understand youthful idealism; I had plenty of it. And I certainly understand the anger that has turned many Sanders’ way. But idealism and anger are not going to change our state; that is only going to happen when Democrats once again become competitive statewide. Along with a lot of others, I am so tired of toiling in the trenches for the Democratic Party and then watching as we form a circular firing squad. We need to seize this opportunity we’ve been handed. We need to be relevant once again.”

Bell’s thinking is similar to the Clinton strategy of the 1990s: It contains the implicit assumption that the electorate is to the right. But it also shows the thinking of all the Democrats who proposed alternate plans to Hillarycare, dooming it to failure. What it misses is that one doesn’t have to message within the self-focused paradigm. Given imagination and leadership coupled with the current demographics and psychographics, the fabric of political space-time itself can be altered. The numbers suggest that the same voters that deliver the presidency could also deliver the Senate. That is an argument for what Sanders is trying to do, and an explanation of why he is gaining grass-roots momentum against the favorite of party leaders with ties back to Bill Clinton’s presidency: He is presenting a philosophical alternative that refuses to play in the Republican message box. Sanders, on the other hand, may have an upper ceiling unless he can make an argument that is both philosophical and strategic, showing Democratic leaders like Bell how they can win. If he can, we could see the Clinton coalition begin to crumble because its foundation is more strategic than philosophical. Either candidate can thus benefit from making the other’s argument, because what the time calls for is a strategic approach to a philosophical change, as Sanders correctly identifies: not just winning the White House, winning the hearts of the electorate. Whoever does it first and most wholeheartedly could run away with the prize. Americans are undergoing a seismic shift in the political landscape, one that would seem to favor Democrats, but they may hand it away by refusing to unify and boldly grasp it. The numbers show that the time for the sort of bold, visionary appeal to the shared interests of society is finally arriving. If Democrats can capture it, they could elect an epochal president, one that has the power to redefine the argument as Reagan did, for the next 35 years.“This campaign is about a political revolution,” Bernie Sanders says on the campaign trail, “to not only elect the president, but to transform this country.” Hillary Clinton replies that that’s a pipe dream and points to how hard it is to make even incremental progress against an intransigent Republican Congress. But while Clinton has good reasons for this rejoinder, she may be misreading the political landscape, and would do better politically by stealing Bernie Sanders’ ideas. Both numbers and recent history show that if the next president paints a big enough vision on the campaign trail, he or she could become as influential as Ronald Reagan. Here’s how. The politics of selfishness In 1978, Stanford Research Institute was charting the effect that the baby boomers were having on American society. Businesses were struggling to market to a generation that cared less about status and more about personal expression. This was the Me Decade, obsessed with human potential and self-actualization, and in California, Ronald Reagan was watching this change firsthand. Arnold Mitchell and his colleagues at SRI hit on a new market research method to get a handle on what was going on, which they called VALS, for Values and LifeStyle. Instead of using traditional demographics, they targeted people psychographically, based in significant part on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which put self-actualization at the pinnacle of human experience. The research found something stunning: There was a large and growing group that hadn’t been understood before, which they called the Inner Directeds. These people cut across traditional demographic lines, and what they had in common was their desire to live life on their own terms. Reagan took advantage of this group in the 1980 election. Boomers hated government and had railed against it since the Vietnam War. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” Reagan told them, “government is the problem.” You shouldn’t have to conform to government mandates, you should be free. Instead, Reagan put business at the center of American culture. It was business, he argued, that could best fulfill the needs of the individual, efficiently, cheaply, and with great abundance and variety, helping them to express themselves and their uniqueness. The consumer was king. Boomers responded by voting for Reagan in huge numbers, in both the 18-26 and 27-38 age brackets. The sudden loss of young voters rocked the Democratic party to its core. In 1992, Bill Clinton was the first candidate to use massive focus group testing to assess boomer attitudes, and to make a values sell based on individual fulfillment, instead of the old-style democratic politics of appealing to voters’ common interests. Government was a service to the individual, like business. Voters were passive consumers of politics, instead of active participants in it. Clinton crafted his message to fit exactly what the focus groups said suburban swing voters wanted, and promised tax cuts. “Government is in the way,” he told the Democratic National Convention. “It’s taking more of your money and giving you less in return.” But once in office, Clinton found the deficit was much larger than expected and he’d have to make deep cuts to social programs, so he dropped the tax cut proposal. This angered the inner-directed, anti-government suburban boomers Clinton had used to build a coalition in the campaign. When he proposed what became Hillarycare in 1993—which was about shared interests—they revolted. Disunited Democrats threw up several competing proposals, effectively killing it, and in 1994 voters turned Congress red, throwing Clinton’s presidency into jeopardy. To win reelection against this intense Republican surge, Clinton turned to values and lifestyle targeting data similar to that developed by SRI. “The era of big government is over,” he told voters in his 1996 State of the Union address. He hired Dick Morris and Mark Penn, who overlaid lifestyle data on swing voters to figure out how to identify and message to them on a granular level that reinforced his affinity with them. It was like rock climbing: one piton stake at a time. Under Morris and Penn’s direction, Clinton crafted his message, his public appearances and his policies to what the data suggested, to build a new psychological coalition that cut across ideological and demographic boundaries, and it worked. He won reelection, but he needed a sacrifice. He chose to end Roosevelt’s welfare program, exchanging it for a more Republican “welfare to work” plan, proving that “the era of big government” was indeed over. The president, and the party he led, had learned how to win in an era of self-obsession. They had won the battle but lost the philosophical war. By targeting the self-interest of voters, the Democratic Party became captive to a consumer approach to marketing politics that was playing within the Republicans’ framing. Considering the selfish focus of boomer culture, it may be that this strategy was necessary, as was the constant polling on policy measures during the second Clinton term, and Clinton and Morris would no doubt argue this. But as long as the president and the Democratic Party operated within such reactive political framing, with no appeal to imagination or a larger vision than self-interest, it would also move the country further and further away from the common interest values that the political left stood for. It was also based on an unexamined assumption: that self-interest is indeed the paramount political frame, instead of simply being one of many possible frames. The resulting focus on self-fulfillment at the expense of shared interests radically transformed government and American political and economic thought in the decades since. It’s a different economy, stupid We now know from science that self-fulfillment is not the only frame; in fact it is something of a mirage. Once basic needs are met, at a financial level of around $76,000, more money doesn’t make people happier. Like a carrot on a stick, one can chase self-fulfillment forever and still find it’s not quite within reach. Building a politics on this mirage drives the country ever rightward. When combined with international trade agreements designed to give individuals cheaper goods (which polls well on a granular level) and the attendant rise of globalization ushered in by Clinton, the pursuit of this mirage led to unprecedented corporate power, destruction of the middle class, and environmental disasters that are providing the fuel for Bernie Sanders’ campaign and his call for a political revolution. This is a philosophical struggle for the hearts and minds of the Democratic Party. Considering Bill Clinton’s campaign’s strategic approach and what seems to have become an underlying philosophy, one can begin to understand the challenges Hillary Clinton is facing now that the landscape is changing. After a career in the political cross hairs, focus-testing messages against self-obsessed individuals with short-term horizons in order to eke out small gains from an intransigent opposition, Sanders’ talk of a political revolution must seem laughably naive. But one can also see why this approach, and the underlying assumptions of the market-driven self-gratifying, short-term consumer culture that inform it, is posing major challenges to the old Clinton paradigm, and why Hillary needs a new approach if she is to truly seize the potential that is there in the electorate. Because it’s a different economy, stupid, something Sanders seems to recognize more intuitively than Clinton. As during the rise of Reagan, there is a huge, generational demographic shift underway, and it is also a psychographic one. The oldest boomers were 34 in 1980. The oldest millennials are 39 in 2016. While boomers have been self-absorbed and anti-government since the '60s, their children are growing up in a world where it is corporate power that is run amok, it is corporate power that has become corrupt, it is corporate power that is limiting their possibilities, and it is corporate power and the attendant income, infrastructure and environmental inequality, and its government enablers, that are the new political battlegrounds. A new, powerful coalition Mounting evidence shows that because of millennials’ ties through social media, younger voters do not think of themselves in the same radically self-obsessed, anti-government and entitled consumer ways their boomer parents did. Instead, they tend to see themselves as empowered but also a part of a collective, a social fabric, individual but cooperative, and because of this they value tolerance and equality. Most boomers were anxious to establish their independence; the data show millennials are not. Already the 20-44 population demographic is 8 percent larger than the 45-69 demo, it is significantly less self-focused, it sees the problems differently, indeed the problems are different, and reactive, self-focused politics are no longer necessarily the best way forward. And that means there is, lying there, waiting to be fully awakened, a new, powerful coalition that can reshape American politics by focusing on the common good, while respecting the rights of the individual. Not an either/or, a both/and. A new holistic politics where our shared interests unite us together. This is Clinton’s biggest danger and biggest opportunity: that she stands on the cusp and may not fully embrace its changing values, and so let the opportunity slip by. Looking back at the video footage of 25 years ago, one can see see a beautiful, brilliant, driven Hillary Clinton, fighting to eke out even gains in a culture of economic, political, psychological and social selfishness with a strong Republican current flowing against her. And yet she had the idealism to make that fight then. But Clinton may forever be a woman out of step with her time: once too idealistic and now too strategic. Consider the messaging of Texas congressman Chris Bell, who told the Dallas Morning News that:

“I completely understand youthful idealism; I had plenty of it. And I certainly understand the anger that has turned many Sanders’ way. But idealism and anger are not going to change our state; that is only going to happen when Democrats once again become competitive statewide. Along with a lot of others, I am so tired of toiling in the trenches for the Democratic Party and then watching as we form a circular firing squad. We need to seize this opportunity we’ve been handed. We need to be relevant once again.”

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Published on March 06, 2016 16:30

Stripping and Starbucks — when corporations take over desire

My regular is an elegantly dressed gentleman in his mid-50s, slightly overweight in a way that calls out for the word “portly.” He is soft-spoken and a little dull, but he pays me to listen—two or three nights a week, he comes to the club and buys me drinks and tells me his troubles, but never demands a dance. He likes me, he says, because I am “classy”—in fact, he tells me, I’m too classy for this place. I look around Backstage Bill’s: Smoke hangs languidly in the air, untroubled by air conditioning or filtering machines; 1970s-style wood paneling lines the walls; AC/DC throbs from the sound system; customers wearing T-shirts and baseball hats beckon dancers who wear neon string-bras and thongs. It’s a dive bar, just one that happens to have a lot of half-naked women in it.

He recommends that I audition for Diamonds, another club he frequents, about 45 minutes away. Backstage Bill’s is owned by three unlikely friends: a cop, a Hell’s Angel and a rarely seen, extremely well-groomed man said to be a member of the local Mafia. Diamonds, however, is part of a regional chain and thus more smoothly run. So the following week I drive to Hartford, finding the club on a desolate service road adjacent to the highway. It’s early in the evening, and the few customers in attendance wear button-down shirts and pressed slacks, some even sporting ties. The enormous circular bar sits at the center of the main room, its chrome bar rail reflecting the cool grays that comprise the club’s color scheme. Several dancers share the stage, moving gently as if being blown by a warm breeze. Their costumes look like what I see the undergrads wearing as they shiver outside dance clubs in New Haven: crop tops, strapless mini-dresses and hot pants. A large man in a suit asks if he can help me, and directs me to the manager’s office. The office is organized and clean, and conspicuously lacking posters of porn stars. The manager looks me up and down and then does something shocking: he asks for my ID. For their records. I realize I am in a new realm of corporate accountability.

Once I began dancing at Diamonds, I realized that while Backstage Bill’s was a strip club, Diamonds was a brand. I had started stripping while I was finishing my dissertation far from my home institution and possible teaching assistantships. By day, I wrote about dance as a means of social activism; at night I danced as a means of paying the rent. After several years performing in often avant-garde dance companies, I was used to taking off my clothes for art, but had never imagined doing so for money. But multiple part-time teaching gigs weren’t paying the bills, and when I saw an ad for exotic dance lessons I figured I had little to lose. Soon enough I found myself dancing at Backstage Bill’s, where I joined a diverse group of colleagues: there were dancers from all over the world, dancers over 40, dancers who were tiny, dancers who were tall, dancers who were skinny, dancers who were fat. Some dancers had graduate degrees; some had never attended high school; many lived from night to night, staying in motels because they couldn’t save enough money for a deposit and first-month’s rent. It often seemed to me that the dancers at Backstage Bill’s could have been put on a poster for multiculturalism.

This diversity and eccentricity was reflected in the choreography and the performance qualities that unfolded onstage. Foxy, a statuesque African-American woman who favored 1970s catsuits and glorious wigs, strutted across the stage like John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever"; Marissa, a willowy young dancer from Ukraine, levitated upside-down around the pole with ease; Summer, big, bouncy and blond, bantered with customers while doing the splits, jokily castigating them if they didn’t tip her well enough. For some dancers, stripping meant bumping and grinding; but for others, it meant flirting, or laughter, or a display of their own erotic pleasure.

After filling out my paperwork at Diamonds (something Backstage Bill’s would never have tolerated), my “audition” consisted of removing the costume that I had carefully chosen for the occasion— I didn’t have to dance at all. Somehow I was hired, despite being 10 years older and 20 pounds heavier than the vast majority of the other dancers. And there were a lot of other dancers: while Backstage Bill’s might have had 15 dancers working at one time, Diamonds often had 60 or more, all of whom looked very much alike. With few exceptions, the dancers at Diamonds were 18 to 24 years old, white, thin and fit but not athletically so, with straight shoulder length blond or light brown hair. Management dictated what we could wear, how we should talk to customers, and how we should dance: no pelvic thrusts, no shimmies, no bumping and grinding. We think of striptease as being about sex, but at Diamonds sex was stand-in for consumption. Unlike the raw sexuality of much of the movement at Backstage Bill’s, the dancing at Diamonds catered to a capitalist fantasy of delightfully clean, uniform women who could be purchased and consumed.

The difference between the two clubs was exemplified by Diamonds' ritual of selling calendars on weekend shifts: five times a night the DJ would play Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls,” a signal to all the dancers, no matter where we were or what we were in the middle of, to drop everything and rush to the dressing room. There we were given copies of the club’s current calendar, which we were meant to hawk to the customers. We were lined up and paraded swiftly across the stage as if in a beauty pageant, and then forced to swarm into the audience trying to sell a package deal of a calendar and a lap dance for $25. If we were lucky enough to convince someone to take this deal, we had to turn $15 over to the manager for the calendar, thus being paid half the usual rate for the dance. As dancers, we were as packaged and standardized and managed as the shrink-wrapped calendars we were pushing on our customers.

Striptease embodies an ongoing debate about the power of corporations and brands to infiltrate every facet of our cultural and personal lives. In the past two decades, the striptease industry has transformed from mom-and-pop clubs perceived as seamy dens of illicit desire to multinational corporate chains that project an aura of wholesome, middle-class good fun. Exotic dance has become a global commodity, stripped of its potential to express subversive desires—erotic and otherwise. At Diamonds and other corporate strip clubs, dancers and customers alike perform a demographically designated brand that shapes desire in much the same way that Starbucks inculcated a taste for frothy espresso drinks. Every time I donned a hot pink dress I had bought at the mall or eschewed floor work for yet another strut around the pole, I lived and moved its upper-middle-class, middle-brow, white, “lite” brand of sexuality, one which seemed all too appropriate to its location on the outskirts of a city that had once been touted as the insurance capital of the world. Stripping allowed me to move in new ways, to embody new and sometimes uncomfortable ideas about myself as both a desiring subject and object of desire. Performing this kind of dance, and having my performances appreciated by customers, changed the way I felt about my body: always considered “voluptuous” (a frequently deployed euphemism in the dance world for “fat”) in the realm of contemporary dance, the excesses of my body were valued in striptease, and I grew to value them too. But there was something almost uncannily familiar from other service jobs in stripping at Diamonds: subject to management directives, costumes became uniforms; improvisations became routines; conversations became scripts. I began to resent the club and the customers, and to commit small acts of resistance: I wore five-inch heels rather than the regulation six; showed up late with long fake excuses, delivered with “real” tears, just to see if I could act well enough to avoid the fine; dressed in bizarre, bondage-ish costumes that I knew no one at the club would like. Finally, I did something that I knew would mean I could never return: I pocketed the $15 I earned on a calendar sale and lied to the house manager, telling him, straight faced, that of course I had given him the calendar back as usual. With sixty girls working the shift, I knew there was a chance he wouldn’t catch me, but I also knew that he thought that strippers were lying thieves in any case—and that now I had become one. It was time to go.