Book Review/Heather Seggel

What's Wrong with the Economy, and What Can We Do About It?

Two new titles from Nation Books offer different perspectives on the world of finance and who runs what. When Carmen Segarra was hired by the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, she was tasked with regulating Goldman Sachs. This was in 2011, after the the financial crisis had made it clear that stringent oversight was needed. From the moment she came on board, though, both Goldman staff and her own coworkers at the Fed were hard to read. She was repeatedly prevented from getting the full training needed to do her job correctly, and often felt that even the most solicitous and helpful coworkers were attempting to misdirect her. By the time she’d discovered the truth — the Fed had an agreement to conceal information in order to improve Goldman’s public ratings and inspire more consumer confidence — she was fired. She sued, and famously got secret recordings of the malfeasance out via an episode of This American Life on NPR before a gag order could prevent it. Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street is her story.

What happened to Segarra is dramatic. Unfortunately, she ramps the dramatics up so much in retelling the story that it’s harder for readers to understand the nature of the wrongdoing she exposed. Someone makes a seemingly innocuous comment at a meeting, and “Eyes were popping out of sockets like ping pong balls.” Scenes like this, and ones where she projects a vast amount of intent onto people based solely on body language or someone’s facial expression, end up burying the lede: Goldman Sachs was shockingly corrupt, and went so far as to maintain no internal conflicts of interest policy in order to avoid being accused of said conflicts. It’s clear that her experience was traumatic, but a more dispassionate telling of the facts would make that plain beyond any doubt.

At the end of the book, Segarra advises readers that things are as bad if not worse now in the financial world, and suggests asking questions of your bank and demanding accountability. It’s yet another reminder that we don’t work for these institutions, they work for us, and it’s incumbent upon us to take that power back if we want to see it used equitably.

How about if, instead of shaking our fists up at these financial monoliths, we created a way for everyone to share in the success or failure of a venture, rather than a pyramid scheme or “gig economy” scam? Nathan Schneider didn’t invent cooperatives—they’ve been with us all along—but in Everything For Everyone: The Radical Tradition that is Shaping the Next Economy, he argues for bringing them back in force. Schneider argues that co-ops, from the obvious (your neighborhood health food store) to public utilities, credit unions, and taxi companies, succeed by putting the people who use them in charge of the services they rely on, creating a far more stable and democratic model than capitalism as we know it today. He explores work being done by people we think of as outsiders, like a computer hacker working on a cooperative cyber-currency, then pivots to local governments in the US and how they’re empowering citizens to become stewards of their economic future.

It seems obvious, bordering on ridiculous: If we’re invested in the outcome and have a stake in producing it, we are likely to work hard to ensure success and take pride in the results. Top-down business neglects the people it purports to serve; a family run on a “trickle down” model would have starving children. If we create models that use our collective energy cooperatively, great things can happen. Oh, wait. We don’t have to create them; co-ops are here already. It’s just long past time for us to create more of them and use the ones we have with more creativity.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2018

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