The easiest route to political control isn’t brute force: Sure, you can stick a gun in somebody’s face, but that’s always a risky business. The easiest route to political control is economic control. It’s cleaner, it’s safer, and it works.
There are some spectacular examples of that in India. In order to “protect” pepper farmers from being exploited by the ruthless profiteers of the free market, political bosses decided that farmers could sell their produce only to a government-approved buyers’ cooperative, the representative of which was usually — because every protection racket takes roughly the same shape — the uncle or brother-in-law of the local political boss, who often was the local money-lender, too. It’s a long and complex scheme (a story told brilliantly by P. Sainath in Everybody Loves a Good Drought) that ended in pepper farmers’ being kept in intergenerational debt bondage . . . for their own protection, of course.
Ahmad Zaatari saw a fair amount of that sort of thing growing up in Lebanon, where his well-to-do family of entrepreneurs and professionals were on the outs with the local political boss. Uncles and cousins of his father saw their factories closed on this or that pretense, and their land taken by the government. Zaatari himself ended up at a high school controlled by that same political boss, who maneuvered to make life miserable for the young man. In the end, Zaatari did what hundreds of thousands of Lebanese have done over the years: He moved to the United States. There are an estimated 3 million Americans of Lebanese origin living in the United States today; there are only 4.5 million Lebanese in Lebanon.
“My grandfather invested in real estate,” Zaatari says. “He was initially in textiles in Nigeria and the United Kingdom. Those investments saved the family, and that’s how I was able to come to the United States. I’ve always known real estate was a smart investment — it’s ingrained in me.”
Naturally, he bought a house. He bought that house in Austin, where he was involved with a number of technology start-ups after getting his master’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Texas. His wife worked as a consultant, and they had a baby, and things were looking pretty good at the start-up where he worked developing high-tech equipment for the oil-exploration business. Buying a house in the Rockdale Circle section of Austin, far from the most expensive or most fashionable part of town, wasn’t a huge stretch.
Until the bottom fell out of the oil market, as it does, from time to time. Zaatari’s company lost a $6 million order, and pretty soon it didn’t have enough money to pay its engineers. Zaatari had a pretty good-sized mortgage and had drawn down some of his investments to make the down payment, and he is not rich. “Working in start-ups,” he says, “I’ve gained a lot of experience — not a lot of money.” Those obligations weren’t too bad for a two-income household, but they were going to be pretty rough on a one-income household.
He didn’t want to sell his house. He also didn’t really want to go get a clock-punching, steady-paycheck job, either — an energetic entrepreneur, he already had a proposal in to the National Science Foundation for an education-technology project he was developing. All he really needed was a little financial breathing room until he figured out his next step. That is one of the many faces of the so-called gig economy: It isn’t just people who can’t get a regular job, but also people who don’t want one, people who are working on something else and just need a bit of income for a while. Albert Einstein worked at a patent office, but he didn’t plan on making a lifelong career of it.
